File spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/deleuze-guattari_1998/deleuze-guattari.9810, message 180


Date: Mon, 19 Oct 1998 17:01:35 -0800
From: peter.johnson-AT-anu.edu.au (Peter Johnson)
Subject: Re: Can we think about the flowers


>Can one, without romanticising, mystifying nor with tongue-in-cheek, live
>professionally? In other words, can one make a living, living?

>David Fussell 
>Unemployed.

Licking the salt-block, not biting my tongue, with locks waving not shorn
short, I would have to ask about 'professional life'.  (Residues on a
sheeps arse.)  Is this to do with occupation, with what we occupy and how
we stake space?  Or is to do with merging into the mask of the discipline,
bundying on and off with the clock?  What would these technologies of
constraint do to ourselves and the images we project onto others?  As if
the mask was separate from the wearer, as if the wearer did not become with
the masks they wore.  Why not let your hair down, are you bald, or your
hair too well trained to comply?  (What value the image?) Is it to get a
publication track record or be nice, oh so nice, to the parisien idiots? 
I'm sure paris is lovely and that some of the publication seekers will
tweek my dials but that wasn't the point, was it?  I've always considered
myself an amateur in several ways, and this is reinforced by my lack of
ability to attain a job (never did learn to be a mealy-mouthed brown
tongue) which has little to do with the stated job criteria but is more
about hairstyle, being the right stuff, etc.  Being studiously occupied
would be something else again (don't have to attach a photo, yet.)  On the
other hand there is a different experience inculcated by hand to mouth
contact with the profession, to actually see the moves and the linguistic
resevoirs as they take place.  To come in contact with the subtleties and
overlappings, convergences of the flows. To feel the weight (Millet) of the
eclectic examples and grammatical 'certainties'.  To hear the ineptitude
and lack of foundation if the safety net of (say) economic rationalism is
questioned.  Problem is not to let it return as foot in mouth disease.  To
break feet and not Monica.  Personally I prefer to make declarations of
independence rather than to suffer from them (yes I'm pathetic).  And to
continue to live, although not easily, is then to be one step from death on
the border of the profession.  A risky business living in no-mans land...

Authentic fiction, or fictive authenticity, or something else again, or ...
I'm not sure I know.  Do you?

Hypatia
w0rker


   

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