Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 12:03:08 -0700
To: <deleuze-guattari-AT-lists.driftline.org>
Subject: Re: [D-G] Carnival and Violence


hello rumagin, you might want to look at D and G's What is Philosophy for a more nuanced account of geopolitical intersections. Also worth turning to Braudel for much of the underpinning logic of flows in the long duree. I originally trained as a historian and while I have long since dumped content specific causal links i think it important not to dump the specificity of the case. I am intrigued by what you mean by dysfunctional. Are you implying a residual functionality or moral law? Maybe there is room in your study for some political analysis of the contracts and duties specific to Trinidad and Tobago? Maybe there is some dissonance between indiginous and western codes that has not yet hybridized into a new form of functionality?

best wishes
ruth.c
nb superdragon refers to a moment in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The text opens with Zarathustra opposing the dragon of Christian morality but later Nietzsche suggests that the Superman needs a superdragon. The superman can not turn up in timely ways. However, I take the superdragon as an objectile palimpsest of (perspectival) values that can. we are not your usual dragon
Sloughing one's skin.-The snake that cannot slough its skin perishes. Likewise spirits which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be spirits (Nietzsche: Daybreak:V:573)   


--- rumagin-AT-aol.com wrote:

From: Dylan Kerrigan <rumagin-AT-aol.com>
To: deleuze-guattari-AT-lists.driftline.org
Subject: [D-G] Carnival and Violence
Date: Mon, 04 Sep 2006 12:59:18 -0400

Thank you all who responded, the emails are all useful and extremely 
divergent.

The haitian examples are important, but because of my geographical 
choice of Trinidad and Tobago they relate to a distinct historical 
schema, as such they more inform my thinking than offer a parallel. What 
super dragon (i love dragons) says about it not being "necessary to 
establish a relational content specific link between capitalism and the 
specificity of the crimes-this would return it to an arborescent schema 
but it could be possible to map the crimes geopolitically, that is 
emerging in an intersection of forces"  helps because the link between 
carnival and violence, while productive in a machinic, coupling sense is 
not causal.  Violence as Hannah Arendt shows in Eichmann in Jerusalem is 
often the result of different cogs moving together at the same time to 
produce finalities greater than the actions of one person alone. these i 
believe are Dragons's geopolitical, intersection of forces, rhizomes and 
thousand plateuxs whose products are never linear.

Dr Crawboney too gets that later, when he talks of echoes, different 
spheres and the spritual/territorial. I would perhaps suggest that this 
is not where haiti is unique but rather this is where the Caribbean as a 
whole is unique, islands who connect to every country in the world. Very 
little of the indigenous populations remains most souls and stories have 
been transplanted - Africans, French Creoles, Lebanese, Indians, 
Chinese, the list is longer than my mind. the violence must relate to 
capital - to schizophrenia - to rhizomes beneath whose surface come up 
and intersect a history that has no western linear narrative.

Unfortuantely for Adline's impressive demonstration of deleuzian 
thinking it confuses a person territorialised in this present cultural 
world. perhaps one day i will be able to communicate answers to this 
that others may also understand, but for now i use your response as an 
example of how difficult the task is to map the intersection of forces. 
Mr Wenk makes points others have but in his own way. first i would say 
that the public discourse of police, the judiciary, psychologists and 
politicians mark the general violence in society, its increase too - as 
random, which following ethnographic research i have undertaken i would 
counter. the violence is not random, people do not just walk up to 
someone they dont know and proceed to murder them because they are 
smiling or playing cards. Headlines may textualise the violence and 
produce such sentiment but this is to create fear, fear to maintain the 
hegemonic status quo because random violence requires hard talk, and 
tough action.

but the connection between forces, between sexualised beautiful naked 
bodies, between grotesque mutilated dead bodies, between road accidents 
everyday, between the profit motive in carnival as opposed to the 
artistic motive, to the fact Trinidad is the no.1 supplier of Liquid 
natural gas to US in the world, to the impact of a disapora which 
touches many of the world's largest cities, to the influx of different 
peoples that made the repopulating of the island possible after 
colonialism wiped out the indigenous souls, to their echo, to much much 
more - these are the different cogs that go together to produce the 
action of one person to murder another, to commit crimes, to do violence 
on the rest of us. These are the parts of a machine that produces, that 
says the system itself is dysfunctional and will only manufacture 
products which are so to

thanks again, more comments are great, but maybe i confused it some more.

best

rumagin


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