Date: Sat, 21 Jan 1995 12:09:16 -0500 (EST)
From: Catherine Griggers <cg1m+-AT-andrew.cmu.edu>
Subject: Re: representation,fascism, racism


Hello from the Literary and Cultural Theory Program at Carnegie Mellon. 
I go by Camilla.

As regards the recent discussion of fascism and representation--out of
what window did D&G's machinic propositions fly? ditto for economies
(regimes) of signs.  Mani, the image of facism as the' failure to throw
the dice of chance' structures the problem in terms of the individual
subject.  Fascism is machinic in the sense of a coordination of
economies of mass mediated signs, transportation technologies,
demographics,the state appropriated war machine, and procedures for
integrating processes of social subjectivization with a despotic
rhetoric of nationalist expansion reterritorialized by capital. Why is
representation still around?  because representation is a function of
the State.  At the level of the social subject, representation is a
function of despotic facialization--the concrete mechanism for social
subjectivization that must by necessity produce the sacrifice. It also
functions doubly under capitalism as a commodity for sale.  I'm
obviously thinking of 1000 P.here.

Also, as to the earlier discussion on little brown persons and D&G, Nick wrote:

"I suspect the response to homey blah blah's inane attempt to stratify 
rhizomatics as a discourse belonging to 'the master' is as irritating 
to everbody as it is to me. What exactly is supposed to have 
obstructed 'a little brown person' on their way into this turbulence? 
It doesn't seem to me that schizzed english can be identified with 
WASP hegemony or the language of the academy (though the latter is a 
security project in process, and exactly what this list is 
contesting). On the contrary, minoritarian lines of flight are its 
most important trajectories, and the key to its planetary 
deterritorialization (its becoming 'American' or homeless). A 
semiotics assembled out of patchworks of external relations is 
incapable of expressing a political dominion. All i can see in these 
interventions is an attempt to silence and ghettoize. (Sorry to make 
a mountain out of a pustule)."

As a little half-brown person feminist-lesbian but also a D&G theorist,I
have to say how could you not understand rhizomatics as a child of the
master discourses of the Enlightenment--albeit a monstrous bastard
child?  A queer child. If it provides lines of flight from that legacy
and that history, well. . .that's because of how you do rhizomatics as a
practice.  But certainly you have to admit that while D&G are constantly
moving toward the minoritarian, they begin in the spaces of the
majoritarian (philosophy for example), and in those space there are ever
so many passwords and orderwords set up to keep 'little brown persons'
out.  As with fascism, racism is machinic; it's not an issue of
individuals (D&G, for example) but of histories, of political economies,
and of regimes of signs. Again, there seems to be little weight given in
this debate to D&G's serious discussion of white despotism and
sacrificial violence.  The face is a politcs honey. No one can escape
faciality, not even D&G. Get over it. There's no need to pretend we live
is some idealized space of perfect equivalencies here to get on with our
business.

On the other hand, imaging D&G as the typical face of the master
discredits how really queer they are.

Hey Fadi, are you out there?

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