The struggle of writing

Over Easter I wrote an alternative introduction to the Orange CultureHub i witness program. Any piece of considered writing is the product of the rival goals of doing one’s best and getting it finished. In retrospect I’m wondering whether parts of the text have a stream of consciousness quality. At certain points the logic of the sequence of ideas is elusive, but I think when a sequence seems at first to be disjointed, it will hopefully encourage the reader to ponder to see how the larger passage does evince a kind of unity of thought. For me, one goal of hermeneutic textual communication is to draw one’s readers into the hermeneutic interpretive circle. (Such writing employs a ‘logic of emergent coherence’, ‘the rationale lying behind a writer's sequence of thought when the sequence of thought embodies within itself an emergent or unfolding meaning’ (McKenzie, 2014, p. viii).)

The text seeks to illustrate and emulate the philosophical hermeneutic mindset it advocates. Consider this statement:

The special theme in 2016 is cultural awareness, which may be approached through attention to the relations between people from diverse cultural backgrounds. Note however that the cultural awareness theme can be – in a sense needs to be – considered in the light of who we are and who we are becoming.

The writer was reaching out here, trying to express an idea that hadn’t fully formed for him. Even now I don’t have a strong sense of the viability/validity of that statement, in the sense that I haven’t attempted to defend or even paraphrase the claim. As I just implied, every text is a compromise between purity and pragmatism. The danger, as always, is to get lost or to lose one’s readers in a cloy-fug of verbiage.

#logicofemergentcoherence