Who's the writer?

Its amazing how interesting the GCSE courses are. They get you to look very closely at the "basic" stuff that you would never look at otherwise.

Narratives got classified in to two types. I forget the details of the passage, but essentially meta-narrator (in my words) and personal. In other words we write from a particular individuals perspective, or we losen up and allow the reader to know things independent of character. I hate the later type of writing for the record - it is lazy, didactic and unrealistic. It is also a complete disaster for philosophy. When you allow your thinking to bring in contents to the narrative which are not derivable from the specific situation then you allow all kinds of prejudices in.

In saying that doesn't we see the two types of political thinking? A lot of people (including myself) say: well if only this or that and then try to find a way of persuading people. What they have done is invent a meta-narrative of the society and then try to inject this meta-narrative into other peoples lives. If other people haven't derived the same narrative - there is a reason, like for example it isn't relevant to them!

Happily a lot of moderate politician seem to recognise that narrative is a matter of discussion and dialogue so that the story gets told by the characters. Sadly many politicians of the political extremes seem to think that the characters can be bossed around by the author and told what to do. Such extremists are not just bad politicians they are bad story tellers.

Hobbes for example was an extremist. His Leviathan stems from the need for a central narrative and someone to impose it. This is the bad and unrealistic version of religion also. If Hobbes had opening his window for a few days and taken a proto-scientific look at the garden in spring he would have seen the natural world unfolding in relative order with no central narrative. The solution of countless little games and strategies, but no central organisation. Bad politicians think in meta-narrative terms. Good politicians realise that the very existence of politics is just a temporary solution to the far greater narrative of the world whose writer is unknown to us (attributed of late to such phantoms as self-organisation (one wonder why self-organisation ever came about ;-), but roundly called God). This is what Anarachy means: the realisation that we owe our entire existence to the Universe and can claim nothing for ourselves or Man: not a manifesto or imperative just a state of realisation about politics. Bad Anarachists (who disgrace the name) by contrast believe that there is a meta-narrative called no-government (which is clearly a contradition).

If I turn against God for a second (call him god because this is a straw man argument): most people probably take a dislike to god because they see him as a meta-narrative trying to enforce the characters in a particular direction. What they don't realise is that in Structuralist terms their very narrative about themselves is written by God (turning to the real thing again). As they struggle with life and what to do with it, and what is right for them and wrong they believe that they are writing a story with themselves as the main characters; they, me? I mean, who? They know this isn't true: there is One world composed in the form of a huge story screened in 6 billion cinemas continuously. That One world is closer to God, the writer of all those individual screenings.

Structuralists would say that the author is the product of the text, an immanent part of textuality. What then I say is "text"? That can't be immanent to textuality as well can it? (Self-reference hypothesis). If text is immanent to textuality then if i don't already know what textuality is then I'm not going to learn anything new! And, if i do already know what textuality is then I'm just being told its a heurmaneutic circle. Heurmaneutic circles are the dog-chasing-tail games that the mind ends up in when it tries to comprehend God, the realisation that the human-mind can go no further than we must accept with disbelief and astonishment that "what is; is". There is nothing further to add when we talk of God - astonishment and disbelief... and humility for I can't even at root lay claim to what is written here for can you see a writer? I can't!