Date: Sun, 3 Apr 1994 19:01:06 -0700 (PDT)
From: Proskauer <prgm-AT-CLASS.ORG>
Subject: Re: Bey and "Death Squad" art


I can only respond briefly to this thoughtful reply:

1.	The question of whether language itslef is repressive is of a 
different degree.  I tend to agree with the Zerzanian critique of 
language, but does Baudriliard & Co. offer anything like it?  See 
Zerzan's -Catastrophe of Postmodernism- (Anarchy #30, Fall 91).

2.	For more of Bey on Language, see his pamplet "Aimless Wandering: 
Chuang Tzu's Chaos Linguistics".  Contact Joseph Matheny at the Well for 
availability.

Cordially,
James O'Meara

Proskauer Rose Goetz & Mendelsohn	E-mail: prgm-AT-class.org	
1585 Broadway				Voice: 212-969-5021
New York, NY 10036			Fax: 212-969-2900	


On Sun, 3 Apr 1994, Tristan Riley wrote:

> Proskauer writes:
> >
> >	I think this message pretty well encapsulates HB's attitude on this 
> >continent-speak mode.  Cut the crap, just give me the tools I need. I am 
> >reminded of Hegel's notion of trying to 
> >escape the "seriousness of the concept" (Mr Tussey's "naked result").  
> >	Surely this is part of the whole Calvinist trip: work for your reward! 
> >(Kant, I think, wrote in a similar vein, and or Hegel did, re Jacobi and 
> >others, seeking mystical intuition "shot from a gun").  Thus, highly 
> >un-emancipatory. 
> 
> i offer just a word or two on my ambivalence toward Bey and the TAZ
> and a comment on the recent discussion concerning what is referred
> to as "continent-speak" above. "ambivalence" in that some things in
> Bey resonate for me (rejecting "revolution" for "insurrection",
> disappearance) while i yet find clinging very tightly about his
> words what Parfrey called "too much vapid humanism" and the
> privileging of "some dim notion of a homo-anarchistic *utopia*" as
> against e.g., the anti-utopian "intellectual S/M" which Bey equates 
> with fascism.  he would i think perhaps be interested in the rhetorical
> similarities between his gibbering denunciation of futurism and all
> art which is *not* "Chaote art" and the treatment modernist art
> received at the hands of the aesthetic revolutionaries of the Third
> Reich (e.g., the Exhibition of Degenerate Art in Munich in 1937, an
> attack on such "degenerate" artists in Germany which is quite eerily
> mirrored in Bey's promise to be "willing to take individual and
> personal responsibility for burning all the Death Squad snuff-art
> crap and running them out of town on a rail (Criticism becomes
> direct action in an anarchist context)" (indeed...in a *Nazi*
> context, the same was/is true, i would add).
> 
> as for "cutting the crap" and getting on with "the tools" needed for
> "the job" (my inferred words, not Proskauer's), i wonder what makes
> such an approach to reading which demands blueprints, demands in other 
> words to be told what to do next, at all desireable in the first
> place.  if Bey too has expressed a predilection for such 'correspondence' 
> theories of how writing ought to operate, this would certainly be in
> accord with what seems his general take on language ("language can
> overcome representation and mediation"[!?]), that is to say, it
> demonstrates in my view that Bey knows very little about the
> Nietzschean understanding of language evinced in e.g., Baudrillard
> and is perhaps still mired in the same 'search for meaning' which is
> pursued by the data-parsing academic linguists he purports to 
> disparage.  
> 
> lastly, i would perhaps remark that indeed Proskauer is right that
> the sort of writing and reading which does not provide blueprints
> and demands the active collaboration of the reader certainly does
> *not* lend itself to "emancipation", if by that one can read "a
> freeing from restraint or bondage".  were i in a more playful mood,
> i might perhaps ask Proskauer for some examples of such
> "emancipatory" writing; as it stands, i'll content myself with
> observing that inasmuch as for some of us such "emancipation" would
> involve 'freeing' oneself from that most fundamental of restraining
> mechanisms, language, "emancipation" quickly becomes a relatively
> unhelpful category.
> 
> Tristan
> 
> 

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