error

so then there's dictee.

the thing with dictee is that this text comes from a completely different place than pensees. there's no claim to an absolute truth, for one. more generally it's postcolonial, situated multiply (france, korea, china, u.s.), and interested in different forms of visual representation (text, images, handwriting, letters; interesting in affecting these forms). my main concern here is with the presentations of error within the work, and what this use, play, presence, representation of error has to say about [the claim to and rejection of the possibility of an absolute truth and certain knowledge in pascal; the purported absence of the truth/false logic replaced by the logic of a bet]

the necessity of recognizing error for it to be error, in a sense. that is, i don't think error can be fully comprehended as the willful act of new creation and continuous becoming (hello deleuze) because its reception (and, i believe its creation) is forever performed against convention, read against the standards of convention. not that they derive from convention in any simply way, but that just because error differs does not mean that it is liberated.

in dictee, the reader is confronted with commissions of error that vary in type. grammatical error, citational errors, error of genre, subjective historical experience (error of that illusive objective factual historiography). error and non-comprehension: the common sense idea, it seems, is that error produces the experience of non-comprehension for the one who reads it. part of what allows convention to repeat is it intelligibility (this intelligibility doesn't seem to come from some absolute truth but rather is generated from the authority of its repetition)

examples: geneology, elitere instead of euterpe, the sappho quote, divisions of word, disappointing the expectations of how text is displayed on a page, order (non-developmental narrative)

a production of error and a production of different intelligibility that comes from trauma. (in a way, the horror and intelligibility of what comes from "convention"? from history) the ritualization of speech, the errors in the represented catechism.

for pascal, the encounter with error always takes place against an absolute truth. not the case here. "truth" is the veil of repetition. but what i think pensees might be able to remind a reader of dictee is that error is always produced and received against a standard. it's never about easy liberation. the tensions in the text also play with this ambivalence between home, mother language, an original past -- these absolute ideals are never entirely abandoned, cannot be. what dictee may remind pensees would be that the ambivalence is irreducible, in a sense. that having at one the assurance of certain knowledge through reason and the abandonment of reason for the risk of a bet (and also the possibility of error; the risk is the risk of being in error), the abandonment of risk for the certainty of a judgment, etc. is an impossible bind and must remain as such. it can't be a decision of either reason or risk, either certainty or a suspended knowledge. in a way a painful ambivalence, but also holds the potential for pleasure.