dishonor is living out of bond

c}{imps 8 my ears

Narrative chance is the fourth of four postmodern conditons invigorating the critique and discourse of native and postindian lit.
One of Vizenor’s many dichotomies. Irony plays a major role in understanding how the colonizing mindset views civilization and savagism. The manifest manners within civilization obscures the naming of the civilized based on what they claim to believe, not on the actions they have taken. Civilized people believe in great systems of written thinking and of bureaucratic governance. Civilized people commit atrocious murders and genocide because it is the rational solution to conflict.
Vizenor does not ramble through static prose attempting to define in manifest terms of closure. He tells a dynamic story full of the accounts of others. Not a page goes by that doesn’t draw on the story of another person to enrich the understanding of his theses.
Contemporary cultural knowledge tells us that admitting fault is a form of closure, but the reality of it is that it opens us up to healing, understanding, and learning. Closure can be read many ways in Manifest Manners, as can every other word. They are all context dependent, as are human beings. His use of words establishes an open network of meaning.
Closure lends itself to belief, one of the most destructive forces Western and postwestern culture engages with.
A word or a component of a word that is derived from a verb. Thus, the centering of the closure of the object, over the continuity of an action. A deverbative fixes the position of an action within a noun. The tension of nominalism reflects the pressure exerted by such a crystalization. A civilization in which everything is always becoming would have less need to privilege nouns.
The dichotomy can represent the natural creation of meaning, however a strict dichotomy observed as a method of closure is the absence of meaning. When we hold two distinctly opposite truths at once in a dialectic, we create an ecstatic truth that cannot be resolved in mere language, only felt or alluded to by it, which does not guarantee reception by readers. A dialectic is as fragile as humor or poetry when one tries to explicate it, one ends up with a series of disemboweled parts which are somehow less than the whole.
On the other hand, a dichotomy is traditionally associated with either/or thinking, a form of belief where a person holds forces in opposition as necessarily needing to resolve on one side or the other. This extremely limited perspective on reality is a handicap on culture. It creates violent disputes where resolutions are not only impossible, but unnecessary.
This glossary is shot-through with this word. It comes from the philosophy of Derrida; essentially it means that there are no fixed meanings of words, that meaning itself comes from an ever-moving interplay between the ends of a dichotomy. There are no fixed points, only tension, only context. Meaning is deferred, as all definition must come through the use of other words, and the definitions of those words, by still more words, and so on.
It means that assigning singular definitions in the style of offering closure would be a waste of time. How do we capture what a word means out of context and relation to the words around it? According to Derrida, we cannot. According to Vizenor, this depth of meaning and context extends through something called reality into everything heard, seen, and felt. There are no individuals, only persons who relate to other persons.
Dishonor is living out of bond with one’s values and community. It is a conflict between presentation and performance. It is a practice of using semantics, rhetoric, performative, and nonperformative actions and words to establish oneself as a pronoun of virtue, while basing this simulation on lies, deception, tyranny.