“I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expression on their surface enigmatical.” -Geertz(Hm... perhaps Geertz is more exegetical than the social expressions themselves are enigmatical?)
In the mean time I've been looking at a couple of papers on Nietzsche and the genetic method.
I find the argument here really convincing. D'Iorio does some impressive sleuth work, heading from library to library to look at Nietzsche's notebooks and his hand-annotated texts:
By contrast I'm somewhat less impressed with:
Paul de Man, Genesis and Genealogy in Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy Diacritics Vol. 2, No. 4 (Winter, 1972), pp. 44-53
De Man makes some really useful points that help to understand the "genetic pattern" employed in The Birth of Tragedy, but he seems to use Nietzsche's dramatic re-enactment of his themes -- e.g. leaving some things out of the final treatment and using a sort of grand rhetoric -- as a way to 'assassinate' the genetic model broadly speaking:
It's certainly interesting to think of the genetic model as a rhetorical mystification, but I'm not at all convinced that Nietzsche's use of it as such (if we're able to believe that) would invalidate, say, D'Iorio's use. It does cast some doubt on de Man's logic, however.
A genetic metaphor (e.g. Dionysus 'giving birth' to Apollo in Nietzsche's framework) is one thing -- an interpretation (e.g. the "aberrant interpretation of Romanticism" that de Man criticizes) is another.
from: Self, Text, and Romantic Irony: The Example of Byron by Frederick Garber, p. 228
To be honest it seems to me that de Man is inventing a quite specific straw-man concept of "a genetic pattern based on the language of organic totalities" that Nietzsche, for his part, would gladly join him in rejecting -- as we can readily see by deciphering his handwriting and its context, indicated above. Back to D'Iorio --
Following a clue in Garber's book, this points to a relevant quote from Jakobson:
from: Certain Difficulty of Being: Essays on the Quebec Novel by Anthony Purdy, p. 32
I think we can agree that the relevant relationships are not always contiguous ones. This matter of "the realistic author [who] metonymically digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the characters to the setting in space and time" would seem to match Geertz's thick description reasonably well.
THAT SAID: 'description' as a method has been amply and ably criticized by Tim Ingold who suggests 'correspondence' instead. To me this seems very similar to the jump from Nietzsche to Simondon, i.e., from genesis to ontogenesis.
Simondon's philosophy feels very "slushy" -- it doesn't seem to believe in organic totalities at all, but it does believe in the existence of the world, and therefor the need to understand beings in context (including the context of their becoming).
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