JamesBirmingham

=Gathered Up and Shrinkwrapped=

The Calcutta Chromosome

A Plague Angel of Histories - media type="custom" key="23701178"



Aphorism 145: Danger of Vegetarians  The immense prevalence of rice-eating impels to the use of opium and narcotics, in like manner as the immense prevalence of potato-eating impels to the use of brandy: - it also impels, however, in its more subtle after-effects to modes of thought and feeling which operate narcotically. This is in accord with the fact that those who promote narcotic modes of thought and feeling, like those Indian teachers, praise a purely vegetable diet, and would like to make it a law for the masses: they want thereby to call forth and augment the need which they are in a position to satisfy.

Sometimes I add both potatoes and rice to my crunchwrap supreme. That explains it.

Aphorism 126: Mystical Explanations Mystical explanations are regarded as profound; the truth is that they do not even go the length of being superficial.

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Foucault

Genealogy does not oppose itself to history as the lofty and profound gaze of the philosopher might compare to the molelike perspective of the scholar; on the contrary, it rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies. It opposes itself to the search for "origins."

In a sense, only a single drama is ever staged in this "non­place," the endlessly repeated play of dominations. The domination of certain men over others leads to the differentiation of values; class domination generates the idea of liberty; and the forceful appropriation of things necessary to survival and the imposition of a duration not intrinsic to them account for the origin of logic. This relationship of domination is no more a "relationship" than the place where it occurs is a place; and, precisely for this reason, it is fixed, throughout its history, in rituals, in meticulous procedures that impose rights and obligations. It establishes marks of its power and engraves memories on things and even within bodies. It makes itself accountable for debts and gives rise to the universe of rules, which is by no means designed to temper violence, but rather to satisfy it. Following traditional beliefs, it would be false to think that total war exhausts itself in its own contradictions and ends by renouncing violence and submitting to civil laws. On the contrary, the law is a calculated and relentless pleasure, delight in the promised blood, which permits the perpetual instigation of new dominations and the staging of meticulously repeated scenes of violence. The desire for peace, the serenity of compromise, and the tacit acceptance of the law, far from representing a major moral conversion or a utilitarian calculation that gave rise to the law, are but its result and, in point of fact, its perversion: "guilt, conscience, and duty had their threshold of emergence in the right to secure obligations; and their inception, like that of any major event on earth, was saturated in blood." Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination.

Blanchot

"Every profound thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood."

This "whole" is neither a concept, nor a system. The incomparably instructive force of Nietzsche's thought is precisely in alerting us to a non-systematic coherence, such that all that relates to it seems to press in from all sides in order to resemble a coherent system, all the while differing from one.

Like all the romantic critics, he combats the fetishism of modern civilization in order to oppose to it a culture that is economically and socially more primitive. But he does not restrict himself to this point of view. He detests the civilization of his time because its fundamental principle lies in the degrading realities of capitalism (mechanization, the division of labor); but he detests this capitalism no less for being, it seems to him, still insufficiently developed. He is thus at the same time the elegiac romantic of past ages and the herald of imperialist development, desiring neither narrow corporatism nor patriarchal relations between owners and workers, his ideal being rather the dominion of the evolved, cultivated capitalists, a domination that would exercise its power over an army of workers as sober as soldiers. The central experience for Nietzsche, as for romanticism, in this view, is man's degradation by capitalism, which tends to reduce everything to the mode of the thing. This alteration of the human by capitalism liberated a superabundance of anarchic feelings, without root and without use, at the same time as it impoverished affective life, brought about excessive intellectualization and a general spiritual abasement.

God is dead; God means God, but also everything that, in rapid succession, has sought to take his place - the ideal, consciousness, reason, the certainty of progress, the happiness of the masses, culture: everything that, not without value, nonetheless has no value of its own; there is nothing man can lean upon, no thing of value other than through the meaning, in the end suspended, that man gives to it.

Nietzsche, we are told, had only a mediocre acquaintance with the sciences. That is possible. But in addition to the fact that he had been professionally trained in a scientific method, he knew enough about science to have a presentiment of what it would become, to take it seriously, and even to foresee - not to deplore - that from now on all that is serious in the modern world would be entrusted to science, to scientists, and to the prodigious force of technology.

Destruction and creation, when they bear upon the essential, says Nietzsche, are hardly distinguishable: the risk, therefore, is immense. Moreover, with its probity and measured steps, science bears this very contradiction within itself: it can produce a world in which scientists would no longer continue to exist as such, a world in which they would no longer be permitted to work according to the objectivity of knowledge, but rather only according to the arbitrary sense of the new world. In other words, by making science possible, nihilism becomes science's possibility -which means that, by it, the human world can perish.

Seen in this way, the first difference between magic and science is therefore that magic postulates a complete and all-embracing determinism. Science, on the other hand, is based on a distinction between levels: only some of these admit forms of determinism; on others the same forms of determinism are held not to apply. One can go further and think of the rigorous precision of magical thought and ritual practices as an expression of the unconscious apprehension of the truth of determinism, the mode in which scientific phenomena exist. In this view, the operations of determinism are divined and made use of in an all embracing fashion before being known and properly applied, and magical rites and beliefs appear as so many expressions of an act of faith in a science yet to be born.

//There is today a frightful disappearance of living species, be they plants or animals. And it's clear that the density of human beings has become so great, if I can say so, that they have begun to poison themselves. And the world in which I am finishing my existence is no longer a world that I like. // As an example of the distinction between signification and value, Saussure notes that 'The French word mouton may have the same meaning as the English word sheep; but it does not have the same value. There are various reasons for this, but in particular the fact that the English word for the meat of this animal, as prepared and served for a meal, is not sheep but mutton. The difference in value between sheep and mouton hinges on the fact that in English there is also another word mutton for the meat, whereas mouton in French covers both.'

Baudrillard argues that when speech and writing were created, signs were invented to point to material or social reality, but the bond between signifier and signified became eroded. As advertising, propaganda and commodification set in, the sign began to hide 'basic reality'. In the postmodern age of 'hyper-reality' in which what are only illusions in the media of communication seem very real, signs hide the absence of reality and only pretend to mean something. For Baudrillard, simulacra - the signs which characterize late capitalism - come in three forms: counterfeit (imitation) - when there was still a direct link between signifiers and their signifieds; production (illusion) - when there was an indirect link between signifier and signified; and simulation (fake) - when signifiers came to stand in relation only to other signifiers and not in relation to any fixed external reality. It is hardly surprising that Douglas Kellner has criticized Baudrillard as a 'semiological idealist' who ignores the materiality of sign production. Baudrillard's claim that the Gulf War never happened is certainly provocative. Such perspectives, of course, beg the fundamental question, 'What is "real"?' The semiotic stance which problematizes 'reality' and emphasizes mediation and convention is sometimes criticized as extreme 'cultural relativism' by those who veer towards realism - such critics often object to an apparent sidelining of referential concerns such as 'accuracy.'However, even philosophical realists would accept that much of our knowledge of the world is indirect; we experience many things primarily (or even solely) as they are represented to us within our media and communication technologies. Since representations cannot be identical copies of what they represent, they can never be neutral and transparent but are instead constitutive of reality. As Judith Butler puts it, we need to ask, 'What does transparency keep obscure?.' Semiotics helps us to not to take representations for granted as 'reflections of reality', enabling us to take them apart and consider whose realities they represent.

As Roland Barthes noted, Saussure's model of the sign focused on denotation at the expense of connotation and it was left to subsequent theorists (notably Barthes himself) to offer an account of this important dimension of meaning. In 'The Photographic Message' (1961) and 'The Rhetoric of the Image' (1964), Barthes argued that in photography connotation can be (analytically) distinguished from denotation. As Fiske puts it 'denotation is what is photographed, connotation is how it is photographed'. However, in photography, denotation is foregrounded at the expense of connotation. The photographic signifier seems to be virtually identical with its signified, and the photograph appears to be a 'natural sign' produced without the intervention of a code. Barthes initially argued that only at a level higher than the 'literal' level of denotation, could a code be identified - that of connotation (we will return to this issue when we discuss codes). By 1973 Barthes had shifted his ground on this issue. In analyzing the realist literary text Barthes came to the conclusion that 'denotation is not the first meaning, but pretends to be so; under this illusion, it is ultimately no more than the last of the connotations (the one which seems both to establish and close the reading), the superior myth by which the text pretends to return to the nature of language, to language as nature. Connotation, in short, produces the illusion of denotation, the illusion of language as transparent and of the signifier and the signified as being identical. Thus denotation is just another connotation. From such a perspective denotation can be seen as no more of a 'natural' meaning than is connotation but rather as a process of naturalization. Such a process leads to the powerful illusion that denotation is a purely literal and universal meaning which is not at all ideological, and indeed that those connotations which seem most obvious to individual interpreters are just as 'natural'. According to an Althusserian reading, when we first learn denotations, we are also being positioned within ideology by learning dominant connotations at the same time.





Parmenides? That doesn't seem fair to Thales. Where do we detect the libidinal economy of the last of Zeno's paradoxes according to which it follows, from the movement of two equal masses in opposite directions, that half of a certain amount of time equals its double amount? Where do we encounter the same paradoxical experience of an increase in the libidinal impact of an object whenever attempts are made to diminish and destroy it? Consider the way the figure of the Jews functioned in Nazi discourse: the more they were exterminated, eliminated, the fewer their numbers, the more dangerous their remainder became, as if their threat grew in proportion to their diminution in reality. This is again an exemplary case of the subject's relation to the horrifying object that embodies its surplus enjoyment: the more we fight against it, the more its power over us grows.

Where exactly, in this futile circular movement, is the objet a? The hero of Dashiell Hammett's Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade, narrates the story of his being hired to find a man who had suddenly left his settled job and family and vanished. Spade is unable to track him down, but a few years later the man is spotted in another city, where he lives under an assumed name and leads a life remarkably similar to the one he had fled when a beam from a construction site fell and narrowly missed hitting him on the head. In Lacanian terms this beam became for him the mark of the world's inconsistency: s. In spite of the fact that his "new" life so closely resembles the old, he is firmly convinced that his beginning again was not in vain, i.e., that it was well worth the trouble to cut his ties and begin a new life. Here we see the function of the objet petit a at its purest. From the point of view of "wisdom," the break is not worth the trouble; ultimately, we always find ourselves in the same position from which we have tried to escape, which is why, instead of running after the impossible, we must learn to consent to our common lot and to find pleasure in the trivia of our everyday life. Where do we find the objet petit a? The objet a is precisely that surplus, that elusive make-believe that drove the man to change his existence. In "reality," it is nothing at all, just an empty surface (his life after the break is the same as before), but because of it the break is nonetheless well worth the trouble.

In this respect, the role of the cleared cornfield, transformed into a baseball diamond in Phil Robinson's Field of Dreams is exactly homologous to the "black house": it is a clearance opening the space where the fantasy figures can appear. What we must not overlook apropos of Field of Dreams is the purely formal aspect: all we have to do is to cut out a square in the field and enclose it with a fence, and already phantoms start to appear in it, and the ordinary corn behind it is miraculously transformed into the mythical thicket giving birth to the phantoms and guarding their secret—in short, an ordinary field becomes a "field of dreams." In this it is similar to Saki's famous short story "The Window": a guest arrives at a country house and looks through the spacious French window at the field behind the house; the daughter of the family, the only one to receive him upon his arrival, tells him that all other members of the family had died recently in an accident; soon afterward, when the guest looks through the window again, he sees them approaching slowly across the field, returning from the hunt. Convinced that what he sees are ghosts of the deceased, he runs away in horror (The daughter is of course a clever pathological liar. For her family, she quickly concocts another story to explain why the guest left the house in a panic.) So, a few words encircling the window with a new frame of reference suffice to transform it miraculously into a fantasy frame and to transubstantiate the muddy tenants into frightful ghostly apparitions. What is especially indicative in Field of Dreams is the content of the apparitions: the film culminates in the apparition of the ghost of the hero's father (the hero remembers him only from his later years, as a figure broken by the shameful end of his baseball career)—now he sees him young and full of ardor, ignorant of the future that awaits him. In other words, he sees his father in a state where the father doesn't know that he is already dead (to repeat the well-known formula of a Freudian dream) and the hero greets his arrival with the words "Look at him! He's got his whole life in front of him and I'm not even a gleam in his eye!," which offer a concise definition of the elementary skeleton of the fantasy scene: to be present, as a pure gaze, before one's own conception or, more precisely, at the very act of one's own conception. The Lacanian formula of fantasy ( àa) is to be conceived precisely as such a paradoxical conjunction of the subject and the object qua this impossible gaze; i.e., the "object" of fantasy is not the fantasy scene itself, its content (the parental coitus, for example), but the impossible gaze witnessing it. This impossible gaze involves a kind of time paradox, a "travel into the past" enabling the subject to be present before its beginning. Let us simply recall the famous scene from David Lynch's Blue Velvet, where the hero watches through a fissure in the closet door the sado-masochistic sexual play between Isabella Rossellini and Denis Hopper in which he relates to her now as son, now as father. This play is the ''subject," the content of the fantasy, whereas the hero himself, reduced to the presence of a pure gaze, is the object. The basic paradox of the fantasy consists precisely in this temporal short circuit where the subject qua gaze precedes itself and witnesses its own origin. Another example is found in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, where Dr.Frankenstein and his bride are interrupted in a moment of intimacy by their sudden awareness that they are being watched by the artificially created monster (their "child"), a mute witness of its own conception: "Therein lies the statement of the fantasy that impregnates the text of Frankenstein: to be the gaze that reflects the enjoyment of one's own parents, a lethal enjoyment. . . . What is the child looking at? The primal scene, the most archaic scene, the scene of his own conception. Fantasy is this impossible gaze."

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It is sort of amazing to me how much harder this has been to absorb than Zizek's films on cinema. I've seen both of the Pervert's Guides multiple times and always felt like I took something away from them on each viewing - that they were largely digestible. I'm not sure if that says more about his writing, his speaking, or the magic of the screen.

Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological, put up with it, or evade it. Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. Our common understanding of technology:  "instrumental [aimed at getting things done] and anthropological [a human activity] definition of technology"

Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth.

The other point that we should observe with regard to techne is even more important. From earliest times until Plato the word techne is linked with the word episteme. Both words are names for knowing in the widest sense. They mean to be entirely at home in something, to understand and be expert in it. Such knowing provides an opening up. As an opening up it is a re­vealing. Aristotle, in a discussion of special importance (Nico­machean Ethics, Bk. VI, chaps. 3 and 4), distinguishes between episteme and techne and indeed with respect to what and how they reveal. Techne is a mode of aletheuein. It reveals whatever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie here before us, whatever can look and turn out now one way and now another. Whoever builds a house or a ship or forges a sacrificial chalice reveals what is to be brought forth, according to the perspectives of the four modes of occasioning. This revealing gathers together in advance the aspect and the matter of ship or house, with a view to the finished thing envisioned as completed, and from this gathering determines the manner of its construction. Thus what is decisive in techne does not lie at all in making and manipulating nor in the using of means, but rather in the afore­mentioned revealing. It is as revealing, and not as manufactur­ing, that techne is a bringing-forth.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Enframing is the gathering together that belongs to that setting-upon which sets upon man and puts him in position to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. As the one who is challenged forth in this way, man stands within the essential realm of Enframing. He can never take up a relationship to it only subsequently. Thus the question as to how we are to arrive at a relationship to the essence of technology,asked in this way, always comes too late. But never too late comes the question as to whether we actually experience our­selves as the ones whose activities everywhere, public and private, are challenged forth by Enframing. Above all, never too late comes the question as to whether and how we actually admit ourselves into that wherein Enframing itself comes to presence.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Such a realm is art. But certainly only if reflection on art, for its part, does not shut its eyes to the constellation of truth after which we are questioning.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Thus questioning, we bear witness to the crisis that in our sheer preoccupation with technology we do not yet experience the coming to presence of technology, that in our sheer aesthetic­ mindedness we no longer guard and preserve the coming to presence of art. Yet the more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more question­ing we become. For questioning is the piety of thought.

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the semantic field of the word communication designates non semantic movements as well

Thought, as representation, precedes and governs communication, which transports the idea, the signified content.

Deconstruction does not consist in moving from one concept to another, but in reversing and displacing a conceptual order as well as the nonconceptual order with which it is articulated.

Who is this writing for? Is it like the shopping list that one writes for themselves?

The is the equivalent of 3-5 pages of text - you can take my word for it.

Thoughts from class discussion: Why are so many so logocentric? Prehistory is classically defined as the time before writing - but many archaeologists have challenged this narrow way of thinking about non-speech methods of communication. Why do we focus on the idea of preliterate societies? While different, I think non(lexically)semantic communication delivered through means other than writing (like through material culture) fundamentally challenges logocentric perspectives on communication. Granted /we/ are subjects(or objects) constituted through writing, but writing of course is not the only possible system of signs.



...a headless figure threatened with madness and quite innocent of any notion of center, hierarchy, or stability…a vast dark cave where every benchmark and distinction come together in total confusion, and the rifts of a tragic and unhappy human history stand revealed: a mixture of the half-created and the incomplete…in short, a bottomless abyss where everything is noise, yawning gap, and primordial chaos.

Concerned with explaining either single and unrepeatable occurrences or symbolic representations, recent historiography, anthropology, and feminist criticism inspired by Foucauldian, neo-Gramscian paradigms or post-structuralism problematize everything in terms of how identities are “invented,” “hybrid,” “fluid,” and “negotiated.” On the pretext of avoiding single-factor explanations of domination, these disciplines have reduced the complex phenomena of the state and power to “discourses” and “representations,” forgetting that discourses and representations have materiality. The rediscovery of the subaltern subject and the stress on his/her inventiveness have taken the form of an endless invocation of the notions of “hegemony,” “moral economy,” “agency,” and “resistance.” In keeping with an outdated Marxist tradition, most scholars have continued to operate as if the economic and material conditions of existence find an automatic reflection and expression in a subject’s consciousness; to account for the tension between structural determinants and individual action, they lapse into the grossest Parsonian functionalism.

Since the notion of citizen overlaps that of nationality, the colonized, being excluded from the vote, is not being simply consigned to the fringes of the nation, but is virtually a stranger in his/her own home. The idea of political or civil equality— that is, of an equivalence among all inhabitants of the colony—is not the bond among those living in the colony. The figure of obedience and domination in the colony rests on the assertion that the state is under no social obligation to the colonized and this latter is owed nothing by the state but that which the state, in its infinite goodness, has deigned to grant and reserves the right to revoke at any moment.

Venality, because such is the essence of the relationship between human being and animal. Just as the ruminant, for example, feels an attraction to the salt in man’s urine, one could say that the colonized individual feels attracted to the colonizer’s excrements, and vice versa. Conviviality, because there is hardly any form of domination as intimate as colonial domination. But, as we have seen, in many cases the colonized individual—the object and subject of venality—introduced himself into the colonial relationship by a specific art, that of doubling and the simulacrum. Now, to simulate is to cease to inhabit one’s body, one’s gestures, one’s words, one’s consciousness, at the very moment one offers them to another. It works to preserve, in each time and circumstance, the possibility of telling oneself stories, of saying one thing and doing the opposite—in short, of constantly blurring the distinction between truth and falsehood. This means that, as an object and subject of venality, the native offers herself/himself to the colonist as if not himself or herself. The native opens to the colonist as if no more than an instrument whose author or owner was, in truth, separate: a shadow, a spectre, or, so to speak, a double.

'Africa' is used rather than being more specific for very particular reasons - 'Africa' is a symbol/totem - it is the ultimate Other - things of Africa are not Other in the same way - Ardipithecus Ramidus, Egypt, Bonobos, etc. Social scientists of all stripes can use things of Africa in ways far less disempowering than using 'Africa' itself.



<span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">Who is the ethical subject of humanism? The misadventures of international communism might teach us something about the violent consequences of imposing the most fragile part of Marx, the predictive Eurocentric scenario, upon large parts of the globe not historically centered in Europe. It is to ignore the role of capitalism in these scripts to read them simply as various triumphs of liberal democracy. It might be more pertinent to ask now: What is it to use a critical philosophy critically? What is it to use it ethically? Who can do so? This essay will attempt to consider these questions with reference to the word "power" in the famous opening of "Method" in the History of Sexuality, volume one. (25)

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">Resistances are the other term certainly in the sense of terminal-in the field of power relations, that are inscribed there as irreducibly facing. How Foucault's language is bending here to ward us off from the freedom-talk of "the philosopher-functionary of the democratic state! On the very next page Foucault cautions, under the title "Rule of Immanence," that the force field cannot be naturalized and constituted as an object of investigation. One must start from the "local foci" of power/knowledge. If this sounds too much like the provisional beginnings celebrated everywhere in deconstruction, starting with "The Discourse on Method" in Of Grammatology let me assure you that, even for a reader like me, Foucault is not Derrida, nor Derrida Foucault. I cannot find anywhere in Foucault the thought of a founding violence. To quote Marx where one shouldn't, Foucault always remains within the realm of necessity (even in the clinamen to his last phase) whereas Derrida makes for the realm of freedom, only to fall on his face. I would not choose between the two. (33)

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">Our notions of political activism are deeply rooted in the bourgeois revolution from whose inheritance Derrida and Foucault, descendants of 1789, have taken a distance. A call for individual rights, national or psychosexual liberation, constitutional agency, inscribed in a pouvoir/ <span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">savoir deeply marked by the strategy-techniques of management (small m), cannot bring forth positive responses from them. As Foucault says, "knowing all the above, leave it to the people. (45) I am not this our -_-

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">Thus, if we think back about the pouvoir-savoir example of mother/daughter relationships in new immigration, we can see another conjuncture <span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">of similar strands here: writer/activist, subaltern/citizen, in the same nation. Especially in the postcolonial womanspace, this is a much more "complex set of relationships" than Rorty's public-private. Mahasweta's fictions are thus not stories of the improbable awakening of feminist consciousness in the gendered subaltern. They are also not spoken for them, whatever that might mean. She does not speak as them, or to them. These are singular, paralogical figures of women (sometimes wild men, mad men) who spell out no model for imitation. (49)

Interviews

I want to ask the question-the rhetorical question, really does the intellectual, //the// intellectual, have the some role in social production in Australia as in France? It seems to me that one of the problems here is that even as the intellectual is being defined as specific, there is at work there the figure of an intellectual who seems not to be production specific at all. The notion of the different place of the intellectual since May 1968-May 1968 does not have the same impact outside of a certain sort of Anglo-US-French context-I am not at all denigrating the importance of May 1968 within the French context. In fact as a result of reading the material that came out in France about May 1968 ten years later, I was able to see how important the event was. But, even within the US in fact there isn't something that can be called 'an intellectual'. There isn't in fact a group that can be called 'a group of intellectuals', that exercises the same sort of role or indeed power with social production. I mean a figure like Noam Chomsky, for example, seems very much an oddity. There isn't the same sort of niche for him. It is a much larger, more dispersed place which is racially, ethnically, historically, more heterogenous. There, one doesn't think about May 1968 i.n th~ sam: way unless it is within certain kinds of coterie groups. Having lived in the United States for some time, I would say that Berkeley 1967 makes more sense to me. Then if you think about Asia-and I notice you didn't mention that I was an Asian in your introduction; now let me say that I am one-there are intellectuals in Asia but there are no Asian intellectuals (What does that make her then? Or Francis Fukuyama for that matter (gross) . I would stand by that rather cryptic remark. From this point of view I think the first question-the first task of intellectuals, as indeed we are-as to who asks the question about //the// intellectual and //the// specific intellectual, //the// universal intellectual, is to see that the specific intellectual is being defined in reaction to the universal intellectual who seems to have no particular nation-state provenance. Foucault himself, when he talks about the universal intellectual, speaks most directly about the fact that in France, in his own time, there was no distinction between the intellectual of the Left and the intellectual. (3)

My project is the careful project of un-learning our 'privilege as our loss. I think it is impossible to forget that anyone who IS able to speak in the interests of the privileging of practice against th~ privileging of theory has been enabled by a certain kind of production. To my students in the United States, I talk about the 'instant soup syndrome'just add the euphoria of hot water and you have soup, and you don't have to question yourself as to how the power was produced; and to an extent all of us who can ask the question of specificity, all of us who can make public the question of feminist practice, in fact have been enabled b y a long history to be in that position, however personally diadvat aged we might be... One of the things I am doing which seems, from the outside, very complicated and intellectual indeed, is to search out psycho-biographies, regulative psycho-biographies for the constitution of the sexed subject which would be outside of psychoanalysis or counter-psychoanalysis. It seems to me that when one thinks about the question of women or women specifically as sexed subject either in terms of psychoanalysis or in terms of counter-psychoanalysIs, what it leaves out is the constitution of women as sexed subject outside of the arena of psychoanalysis. This is one of the things I am trying to search out. Then you begin to see how //completely// heterogeneous the field of the woman elsewhere is, because there you have to focus on regulative psycho-biographies which are //very// situation/culture-specific indeed; and that effort is one way of using our disciplinary expertise, to see that the constitution of the sexed subject in terms of the discourse of castration was, in fact, something that came into being through the imposition of imperialism, so that the discourse of anti-psychoanalysis is in itself the working within a field which leaves out the constitution of the fe male subject elsewhere. That's one of my projects of unlearning my privilege, because in fact what is being done is that this kind of psychoanalytic discourse is being imposed upon the woman elsewhere. (9)

Honestly I'm with Eagleton...







Butler

I would like to suggest a formulation for the problem that might seem paradoxical, but which I think, even in its hyperbolic mode, might shed some light on the problem that regulating hate speech poses. That formulation is this: //the state produces hate speech,// and by this I do not mean that the state is accountable for the various slurs, epithets, and forms of invective that currently circulate throughout the population. I mean only that the category cannot exist without the state's ratification, and this power of the state's judicial language to establish and maintain the domain of what will be publicly speakable suggests that the state plays much more than a limiting function in such decisions; in fact, the state actively produces the domain of publicly acceptable speech, demarcating the line between the domains of the speakable and the unspeakable, and retaining the power to make and sustain that consequential line of demarcation. The inflated and efficacious utterance attributed to hate speech in some of the politicized contexts discussed above is itself modeled on the speech of a sovereign state, understood as a sovereign speech act, a speech act with the power to do what it says. This sovereign power is attributed to hate speech when it is said to "deprive" us of rights and liberties. The power attributed to hate speech is a power of absolute and efficacious agency, performativity and transitivity at once (it does what it says and it does what it says it will do to the one addressed by the speech). Precisely this power of //legal// language is that to which we refer when we call upon the state to effect the regulation of offensive speech. The problem, then, is not that the force of the sovereign performative is wrong, but when used by citizens it is -wrong, and when intervened upon by the state, it is, in these contexts, right. (pg 77)

I agree with Butler that this is the case in the way our system works - but I do not think the category can't exist in a comparable form without the State. The state and the legalistic sanctions implied within it sanction what is or isn't 'hate speech' - but there is no reason other sorts of sanctions (diffuse, religious, etc) couldn't be deployed to sanction the acceptable speech acts of others - non-legalistic sanctions can be just as and sometimes more effective than jurisprudence. So called 'egalitarian' societies use a variety of sanctioning practices to police what acts (speech or otherwise) are legitimate and what acts aren't. Anarchist and other leftist communities also create sanctions that do not primarily rely on the legal system. So 'hate speech' can be demarcated without the State imho.

When the source of racism is reduced to a single speaker and his or her audience, the political problem is cast as the tracing of the harm as it travels from the speaker to the psychic/somatic constitution of the one who hears the term or to whom it is directed. The elaborate institutional structures of racism as well as sexism are suddenly reduced to the scene of utterance, and utterance, no longer the sedimentation of prior institution and use, is invested with the power to establish and maintain the subordination of the group addressed. Does this theoretical move not constitute an overdetermination of the scene of utterance, one in which the injuries of racism become reducible to the in juries produced in language? And does this not lead to a view of the power of the subject who speaks and, hence, of his/her culpability, in which the subject is prematurely identified as the "cause" of the prob lem of racism?

(I know some folks have (imho) misread this as opening the door to apologism, but I think the move here to point out how our language around these utterances structures how we conceptualize the physics of oppression(s) is important.) (One can call someone out for saying heinous shit, relate to that person how they see fit, /and/ recognize that them saying heinous shit is not the cause of said oppression)

In this sense, I am not opposed to any and all regulations, but I am skeptical about the value of those accounts of hate speech that maintain its illocutionary status and thus conflate speech and conduct completely. But I do think that the ritual chain of hateful speech cannot be effectively countered by means of censorship. Hate speech is repeatable speech, and it will continue to repeat itself as long as it is hateful. Its hate is a function of its repeatability. Given that the slur is always cited from elsewhere, that it is taken up from already established linguistic conventions and reiterated and furthered in its contemporary invocations, the question will be whether the state or public discourse will take up that practice of reenactment. We are beginning to see how the state produces and reproduces hate speech, finding it in the homosexual utterance of identity and desire, in the graphic representation of sexuality, of sexual and bodily fluids, in the various graphic efforts to repeat and overcome the forces of sexual shame and racial degradation. That speech is a kind of act does not necessarily mean that it does what it says; it can mean that it displays or enacts what it says at the same time that it says it or, indeed, rather than saying it at all. The public display of injury is also a repetition, but it is not simply that, for what is displayed is never quite the same as what is meant, and in that lucky incommensurability resides the linguistic occasion for change. No one has ever worked through an injury without repeating it: its repetition is both the continuation of the trauma and that which marks a self distance within the very structure of trauma, its constitutive possibility of being otherwise. There is no possibility of not repeating. The only question that remains is: How will that repetition occur, at what site, juridical or non juridical, and with what pain and promise?

Grosz

The tradition of "freedom to" has tended to be neglected in feminist and other radical political struggles, though it may make more explicit and clear what is at stake in feminist notions of subjectivity, agency, and autonomy.

I agree with Grosz that "freedom to" is as important as "freedom from" - this assertion is a backbone of contemporary anarchism. As such while I agree that liberal feminism is guilty of ignoring "freedom to" I would argue that anarchist, marxist, and black feminism (or PoC feminism in general) /has/ made "freedom to" central to their thought. Prefigurative politics present throughout these traditions address " That is, the challenge facing feminism today is no longer only to give women a more equal place within existing social networks and relations but to enable women to partake in the creation of a future unlike the present. (73)" Long before 'today' (2011); 'Another World is Possible' encapsulates this sentiment well - it makes one wonder what 'radical' traditions or which feminists Grosz read up until 2011 - because 'riot grrl' happened in the 90's and the 'freedom to' aspect was front and center even in popular discourse then. Maybe this is an 'Ivory Tower' problem?

The concept is how living bodies, human bodies-that is, male and female bodies of all types - protract themselves into materiality and enable materiality to affect and transform life.

Many of the feminists doing the sort of work/thinking that Grosz here is calling for would immediately put up the flags on 'male and female bodies' - this sort of "biological" scientific thinking is exactly the sort of framing that many "freedom to" feminists are fighting against.

I dream of a future feminist theory in which we no longer look inward to affirm our own positions, experiences, and beliefs, but outward, to the world and to what we don't control or understand in order to expand, not confirm, what we know, what we are, what we feel. Feminist theory can become the provocation to think otherwise, to become otherwise. It can be a process of humbling the pretensions of consciousness to knowledge and mastery and a spur to stimulate a process of opening oneself up to the otherness that is the world itself. At its best, feminist theory has the potential to make us become other than ourselves, to make us unrecognizable.

Word.

I have already argued, along with many other feminists~ that we need to overcome, somehow, the overwhelming dominance of identity politics, by which I mean the overriding concern with questions of who the subject is and how its categorical inclusion in various types of oppression is conceived. We must affirm, with Iris Young, that such specification of identity in terms of race-class-gender~sexual orientation-and-ethnicity~ must ultimately lead to individuality alone~ to unique subject positions which then lose any connections they may share with other women in necessarily dif ferent positions. But if subjectivity, or rather the reduction of subjectivity to identity~ is to be overcome in feminist thought~ then we need other terms by which to understand these categories of oppression~ terms other than those which converge on and find their unity through the subject.

I don't disagree - but I think it is worth pointing out that this is much easier to say being white.

__ On the ethical/political efficacy of interaction or 'facing' someone/thing.

In a vacuum I can see the motivation to see interaction itself as a good, and I am not saying it is in and of itself an ill - but how we interact with others is mediated by the structure of the Social we live in. So one's interaction with the black boy or the Muslim girl is territorialized by white supremacy or Judeo-Christian norms. Sometimes interactions with the other simply reinforce the dominant (problematic/evil) culture - because one experiences these interactions through the lens of the culture/ideology one has been raised into.

On neurological origins:

Racism is how white supremacy is actuated/experienced in the world - sexism is the same for patriarchy, homophobia for heteronormativity, etc. Those structures are socially-constructed. If there are any neurological bases for the virulency or prevalence of those problematic structures perhaps it is in some basal primordial part(s) of the brain which rejects or fears The Other - some base 'negative' feeling stemming from species/family recognition or the like.

The question for me is what is the politico-ethical use of such an investigation? Same question applies to framing oppression in medical language (pathology or the like).



<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Given the hyper-accelerations of 20th century techno-media and the coincidence of any era of ‘cinema’ with that of exponential growth, techno-genocide, hyper-consumption and global financialisation—that is to say, the totalising mediacratic trances of today—we could instead trope this as the cinemanthropocene or cinanthropocene era, the epoch without ‘epochality’. This makes Derrida’s disavowal of cinema as a ‘diversionary art’ the more problematic and an effaced cipher. Cinema would be banished. It would be occluded by Derrida but not because it was a pop or ‘diversionary art’ (a banality and cliché of modernist aesthetics). Nor would it be disavowed because it was ‘infantile’, or related to ‘America’ (always problematic for him). Nor would it be banished because, in contrast to the photograph, which could be written on cinematically in effect, cinema exponentially deranges the citational relationality one could pretend to hold in place. Instead of the still photograph with its ‘citational structure’ (Eduardo Cadava), each imperceptible frame multiplies the citational abyss in a horizontal vertigo (Hitchcock) beyond mastery. Moreover, cinema is ineradicably alert to its machinal ‘materiality’ and ability to produce phenomenalities from mnemonics and points. Nor was it disavowed because the cinematic ‘mark’ precedes any scriptive sign, letter, or graphic—that is, as Derrida notes, it implies in advance all deconstructive techniques. It would be disavowed in a similar manner to how ‘climate change’ would, or a certain ineluctable and nonbinarised ‘materiality’, or a machinal trace that implacably drives (and displaces) ‘psychism’.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Enter, the ‘anthropocene’. This term or non-name arrives in a tangle of forces without any appeal to sovereignty. It has turned the current geopolitical <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">and geo-economic climate into a paralysed network of zombie systems (in denial) angling for momentary advantage before the next reset hit: Euro-collapse? Methane bubbles from the tundra? Oceanic acidification?—the menu is suddenly endless.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">What is clear is that ‘deconstruction’ today deconstructs nothing, curls back on itself fetishistically, and relies on a certain misreading of the <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">persona (‘Jacques’) for instructions that were missing. Its execution is even more suspect—hagiographic ameliorations, naturalisations. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">(This, of course, includes shifting the title of the ‘last’ interview from ‘I am at war with myself,’ as it appeared in le Monde, to the ameliorating <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">bathos of ‘Learning to Live, Finally...,’ shifting from Derrida’s gesture of disinheritance and autogenic war to a farewell to Hamlet: one <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">witnesses between these two titles the war between the two Derridas recurs as a translational effect.) It is also clear that if the ‘anthropocene’ <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">implies ecocide, and the current global regimes accelerate or seal this process, and if these same do so through a totalisation of mediacratic trances, then there is—even for the most peace-seeking among us, like myself—an implicit war within the global disposition. Its stakes <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">might be any ‘futures’ at all (a truly misused and misbegotten term) or ‘survival’ on a para-species level—but that, in itself, also should not be the metric.



<span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">“Sustainable capitalism” might be one of those contradictions in terms along the lines of “military intelligence.” Capital must keep on producing more of itself in order to continue to be itself. This strange paradox is fundamentally, structurally imbalanced. Let’s consider the unit of capitalism: the turning of raw materials into products. Now for a capitalist, the raw materials are not strictly natural. They simply pre-exist whatever labor process the capitalist is going to exert on them. Surely here we see the problem. Whatever pre-exists the specific labor process is a kind of lump that only achieves definition as valuable product once the labor has been exerted on it.

<span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">Capitalism did away with feudal and pre-feudal myths such as the divine hierarchy between classes of people. In so doing, however, it substituted one heck of a giant myth of its own: Nature. Nature is precisely the lump that pre-exists the capitalist labor process. Martin Heidegger has the best term for it: standing reserve, bestand.

<span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">You are walking on top of lifeforms. Your car drove here on lifeforms. The iron in Earth’s crust is distributed bacterial excrement. The oxygen in our lungs is bacterial out-gassing. Oil is the result of some dark secret collusion between rocks and algae and plankton millions and millions of years in the past. When you look at oil you’re looking at the past. Hyperobjects are time-stretched to such a vast extent that they become almost impossible to hold in mind. And they are intricately bound up with lifeforms.

<span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">The spooky thing is, we discover global warming precisely when it’s already here. It is like realizing that for some time you had been conducting your business in the expanding sphere of a slow motion nuclear bomb. You have a few seconds for amazement as the fantasy that you inhabited a neat, seamless little world melts away. All those apocalyptic narratives of doom about the “end of the world” are, from this point of view, part of the problem, not part of the solution. By postponing doom into some hypothetical future, these narratives inoculate us against the very real object that has intruded into ecological, social and psychic space.



<span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">One damaged concept is ‘Nature’— I capitalize it to denature it — damaged and damaging, almost useless for developing ecological culture.

<span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace; line-height: 1.5;">The environment is just a name for a flickering, shimmering ﬁeld of forces without independent existence and in constant ﬂux. Yet lifeforms are also made from their environments, including sunshine and chemicals from exploding stars. There is no way rigidly to separate the biosphere and the non-biosphere. If the Earth had no magnetic ﬁeld, for instance, lifeforms would be sizzled by solar winds:one good sign of extra-terrestrial life is planets with magnetic fields. As if life, once it gets going, includes all that goes around it and before it: terrestrial oxygen and iron are bi-products of bacterial metabolism, and hills are made of crushed shells and bones. Just as writing, when it gets going, includes everything around it too, as if things were always already ‘written’ before people started doing things with pens: dispersed, displaced,never self-identical, infinite like a Menger Sponge or a Cantor Set, full of absence and space. Moreover, just as text is texting, space is spacing,absence is absence-ing—endless unfoldings, translations, distortions, misreadings, mutations.

<span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">As <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace; line-height: 1.5;">Star Trek’s Dr. McCoy says, this is life, Jim, but not as we know it: a strange artificial life, Life 2.0. As Slavoj Zizek argues, Life 2.0 implies that life as such was already ‘Life 1.0’, artificial life.

<span style="color: #ff0000; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">(Trekkie time: that isn't a line from TOS but lyrics from the parody song 'Star Trekkin' and Spock says it not Bones.)

<span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">Life, intentionality, even consciousness might all be intersubjective after effects of more ‘fundamental’ differential processes — though ‘fundamental’ is not quite appropriate, since the surface–depth manifold does not operate in this style of thinking. When life, when writing, has begun, we find ourselves unable to draw a thin, rigid line around it. Ecology thinks a limitless system with no center or edge, devoid of intrinsic essence (no ‘Nature’): calligraphy as biology. So does poetry. This is not here.

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