Some guy said once: Even the idea of “order” is just another abstraction, one that makes sense only as a choice among other possible abstractions and whose significance depends on our ability to discriminate finely among them. Having arrived at the general idea of order, as Stevens does in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” the only thing to do is to begin making a concrete, living, relevant image of order – to initiate the process of relating events so as to arrange them into a coherent whole by deciding anew what matters, what doesn’t, and why.
Royce’s concept of the Absolute as an infinitely self-duplicating object is also, it turns out, an anticipation of what we might think of as California’s affinity with the Absolute. If the essence of the Absolute is that it is the infinite (or from our finite point of view, endless) production of parts of itself that represent (or map) the whole, then Hollywood would seem to have shared what I take to be Royce’s premonition that German Idealism expresses the basic premises of the Golden State. Thus, Paramount Studios designed a map of the state that shows how various parts of it represent the most remote locations, from the Red Sea to the South Sea Islands – that, indeed, shows how California itself can be imagined as, or even more to the point – perhaps it comes to the same thing – can be desired as a text that aspires to embrace the narratives of the world. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
