Experience

We promised we would blog an entry re our meeting last Friday. We read a section or three of Kojin Karatani’s Transcritique. And we read a wee bit of Marx and Kant’s strange “Dreams of Visionary”. It’s probably true to say that we didn’t get very far but that, somewhat paradoxically, it was all very worthwhile. We did stick pretty close to the texts, although there was a bit of a breakout when we wondered about the possibilities of associationism as a form of collaboration. We talked quite a bit about the LETS example, which Brett wondered about (in terms of whether it really worked or not in any interesting way). At first we were wondering about “experience” in this context, and once again we were trying to get to the bottom of Kant, especially the “transcendent apperception x” as discussed by Karatani. We probably thought there was a value in transcritique itself, in its combination of the transcendental method and transversality. We discussed credit as a religious structure, especially in its posing of the trans temporally …the question of experience was either in between all this, as “trans” or perhaps both in a “parallax”.

At the end we decided to read William James and related next time. At the end my main concern, personally, was about the interesting possibilities of associationism in a contemporary context. Karatani tried to form his own movement along these lines around 2000 but I’m not sure it worked terribly well. Nice try though!

Incidentally, Zizek’s recent book The Parallax View seems to come out of Karatani’s work, which Zizek likes and promotes. And this book is Zizek’s best for ages.