From: "frank Callo" <godwine-AT-worldnet.att.net>
Subject: speaking to failure
Date: Tue, 10 Aug 1999 12:15:02 -0700


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Hi all

I wish to speak to failure, the possibility of it.

This is particularly significant as I have been having trouble getting my correspondences on to the list.

I have been off line for about a week and come back to find 50 correspondences.  With limited time to read them all I have tried to get a sense of the "feel of the room".

Silence, love evil, bureaucracy, hardness, coyness, fineness of spirit, what a soup. 

First there is the problem of abstraction, the "body without organs".  What is an organ?  Is a signifier an organ.  Is a signifier which signifies its opposite, the absence of significance("pure difference") equally an organ.  We could totally excercise/excorcise the phallus and stop talking about man/woman, and still not have resolved a certain fundamental conflit: what is really meant by opposite.

Two different things which are different by virtue of the fact that they are things have this fact in common.  This is a no brainer.  What seems to hang up the discourse is the reduction of hetero to homo or vice versa.  identity is guarenteed by alienation.  Thus when a maximum of homogeneity is reached, (corporate, bureaucratic, social) what is left out.  If the system is to be allunifying, nothing must be left out.  Said nothing becomes, so to speak, the "indivisable remainder".  A perfect system lacks a lack which guarentees its perfection.  Such a lack must be created, (when the cold war is over and the communists can no longer be considered a true enemy, "worthy opponent" we turn our attention to Islamic fundamentalists).  The absencence of imperfection is a place left in perfection to erect the imperfection, the flaw, which guarentees its flawlessness.

What can/should a philosopher know beyond his/her university degree.  What fineness of the blood is required?  It seems to me that what this noble element is is simply the knowlenge that absolute knowledge is impossible.  this is because no matter what I think I know I will never really "know" what another thinks.  This other is the place where I am "not all". 

Knowing this must not paralyse me, I must speak, even though I realize such speech will be drowned in the silence of the other.  Not their lack of speech but the opacity of their existence.  An opacity which is only usurped by the rupture/rapture of communication where in we lose the guarentee of our existence.  It should not be thought that such a rapture is an end.  It is an unverifiable unprovable experience in which we all believe to the extent that we attempt to communicate at any level.

In short, once I speak a word I have no real control of how this word is heard by the other.  Its a crap shoot. 

Three meanings of crap shoot:
1. a game of chance, best played in a dark alley.
2. a conversation, usually of no particular note.
3. the obvious one.

We must love to speak to the possibility of failure, a possibility beyond our project. 
Alchemy, turning crap to gold. better recognising the homogeneity between the two.

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