From the archives:
"Something can be judged a work of it art if its arguments are rendered with an idiosyncratic subtlety beyond what is necessary to communicate its ideas, and which may even oppose them, but which so colors our perceptions that we can not separate the sensibility from the idea without feeling a loss."

I wrote somewhere that art is made by loving something so much you see it honestly or hating something so much you see it in its complexity. Eliot was among other things a philosopher and Marx a novelist.

The subtext of numbers in use (the subtext of an application of number) is in the form of language: extrinsic. The subtext of language in use is in another form of itself. Any use of language engages both. There is no linguistic argument against context -rhetoric and history- that is not self-defeating. The arguments of the self-described "reality based" community are predicated on standard American (now neoliberal) tropes. Self-interest is conflated with reason because the possibility of unreason has been removed from the "equation." A work of art made as such is an engagement in both reason and unreason, of argument and -even contradictory- subtext; a unification, a magnification and negation of opposing forces and arguments.