Date:     Sun, 19 May 1996 23:37 EST
From: 044724240-AT-ucis.vill.edu (ED KAZARIAN)
Subject:  Ideology:  or, the "real" problem here...



I just got back home to thirty messages from you people.  Nice to
know we're all still here.  

I want to comment a bit, and hopefully this will not sound like hopeless
whining.  My favorite enigmatic line for today that I'd like to see
its author (tomB) expand on:  'The revolutions turn or burn on precisely the grounds of
our projectional/virtual arts.'  This is good, I think I know what you
mean, and I think it points out a problem that we haven't addressed
directly yet, but which we've been talking all around.  The problem is 
*not* exactly that of whether there is or is not a "real" world, but
that "reality" gets constructed, arbitrated, and employed in different
ways.  Fine, we all know that.  To call even Foucault "a relativist" is
silly because F simply does not engage in any reality talk, for or
against, because his project is to show how reality talk works/has worked
in certian contexts.  To use "reality", or to deny it, would be to
undermine himself:  so instead he talks about "the conditions of reality."
Which brings me to my real point:  which is that what I am more and
more sad about as I read some of the very good points people have made
is that "we"--I mean, the readers of these comments--represent about
1% of the people who read NYT--and the proportion of readers of NYT
to either Lingua Franca or especially Social Text is about the same.
My point, you ask.  Not stupid whining, but rather to observe that
NYT, whether or not some of its readers believe it, *does* act for a
significant number of people as the arbiter of what "really" is
going on, and it arbitrates precisely by selecting a set of "relevant"
facts--some of which, as we know (i.e., morphogenesis as new age) are
quite seriously mistaken, and all of which are distorted by the 
selection:  whose criteria are not stated and would be a massive and
very obscure task to state.  Which is why the "commodity fetishism"
problem, if it exists in acedemic discourse, is magnified a thousandfold
when academic discourse meets "poular" media.  

All of which gets us back to Tom's very apropos little text:  the
problem with projection/virtual arts is that the discourses which
make use of them--including Skokal's--one way are always getting
subjected to another set of projective conditions in the (selective)
process of thier further dissemination (not necessarily meant as an
allusion to derrida).  I do believe this is what Deleuze means by
reterritorialization--which I think does have to do with the
Marxist notions both of commodity fetishism and ideology, or at least,
both of these are particular forms of reterritorialization.  Which
also gets us back to foucault, the use of reality as a principle
of domination, and the whole problematic of power and knowledge.  The
thing that worries me is that *we* are systematically marginalized
and made voiceless by our own critiques of power, precisely insofar
as all the projections/care/virtual artistry that goes into them,
and which goes into constructing the little subjectivities we invest
so much energy in, is systematically obliterated by the discourses
of power themselves and precisely as a mechanism of reterritorialization.  

I know this sounds like stupid whining, and I know that we all know
and are frustrated by this stuff.  The question I am trying to pose
is how the fuck to avoid this re-flux.  Which doesn't even begin to
approach the question of how, effectively, to be "revolutionaries".
I'm still trying to figure out how to effectively avoid becoming
commodified (and even precisely as a revolutionary/news item).

My two (and a half) cents.

Ed Kazarian,

Villanova University

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