Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 01:29:50 -0500 (EST)
From: "Greg J. Seigworth" <gseigwor-AT-marauder.millersv.edu>
Subject: Re: Marriage for dummies




On Wed, 20 Jan 1999, Michael Rooney wrote:  > > On Wed, 20 Jan 1999
Unleesh-AT-aol.com wrote:  

>> There's so much Romance around Marriage .... > [...] 

>> I don't notice many people Marrying their Cats or dogs, or the trees
>> in their front yard.  

> Could it be because marriage involves a pledge of sexual intimacy?

Of trees and sexual intimacy.  From the opening scenario of Brian
Massumi's "To Kill is Not Enough: Gender as Cruelty" (*Continuum*,
Vol.11:2 [1997], p.95): 

"Several years ago I read a certain account in a book about prison therapy
programs for violent sex offenders that put a question mark in my mind.
It was about a man who had assaulted a woman in a park.  As the first step
in his rehabilitation, he was made to watch hundreds of slides depicting
violent acts against women in outdoor settings.  An arousal detection
device was attached to his penis.  The idea was to identify the precise
sequence of events that most aroused him, and then slowly, through group
therapy, bring him to an understanding of how and why his personality had
come to be organized around those acts.  But the therapists couldn't
narrow it down.  The man seemed to respond to every act of violence
imaginable.  The therapists were even more puzzled when they discovered
that he also responded to nonviolent sexual scenarios in outdoor settings.
After intense study, they concluded that there was only one thing that
consistently turned him on: trees."

Cruelty, indeed.  Cruelty engendered.  An aside for possible exploration: 
the trouble with [witty] anecdotes, esp. w/ violence turned punch-line) --
since this reminds me (even though Massumi manages, later, to at least
partially extricate himself from the wickedness of this anecdote and what
it displaces) of Jacqueline Rose's critique of Oliver Sacks' work in her
"*The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat* or *A Wife is Like an Umbrella*" 
(from _Universal Abandon?_, ed. by Andrew Ross, pp.237-250) and of
Meaghan Morris on Baudrillard's fatality in her "Banality in Cultural
Studies" (the pun upon a woman losing an eye but her male seducer losing
face, and a theorist who reaps the benefits of the tale's figuration).
However, for now, such things are neither here nor there (or, rather, here
*and* there ... but, temporarily, beside the point) ... though,
interestingly too, I realize now that, whereas Rose opens with a perfectly
banal Magritte moment ('This is not a pipe'), Massumi's essay [primarily
on Michael Powell's film *Peeping Tom*] turns on a wonderful Magritte
quote: "'Things do not resemble,' asserts Rene Magritte.  'Only thought
resembles.  It resembles by being what it sees.'  The absolute convergence
between being and seeing occurs not in things, understood broadly to mean
material bodies, human or nonhuman, but in visual thinking" (p.104).
Hmmm... yes, well, one can see where *not* maintaining thought w/o image
can end up, I suppose.

And, then BM's closing scenario that I'll include here because it might
have some resonance with aspects of the Nathan-Beth tete-a-tete (or maybe
not since it will do nothing to address or even vaguely hint at how Hegel
devises/deploys the Concept [Begriff], which seems, to me, to still to be
at the heart of the impassibility of their exchange [well, that and the
fact that Nathan is a pip/e and Beth is a tree and I have a tendency to
mistake all things for hats]).  Anyway, here's Massumi wrap-up 'scenario': 
(I'll leave it to anyone else who wants to spot the disjunctive synthesis
versus conjunctive, the eternal return, the virtual and molecular and
becoming/actualization, the molar, reactive forces, etc etc in the
following passage.  Don't think of it as homework though.  Heaven forbid.)

"The film will be approached as a process.  And the process will be seen
as one of integration--of a multiplicity of levels, matters, qualities,
and movements, each of which retains a certain autonomy as a distinct
stratum at the same time as entering into composition with the others to
form a totality.  What distinguishes a process of structuration from the
realization of structure as understood by psychoanalysis is that in the
latter the instantiation of the constituent elements is preceded by their
totality, if only an imaginary one (one all the more insistent for being
imaginary).  The elements are nothing outside of the totality, which they
in turn instantiate as splitting (one all the more inescapable for being
symbolic).  In a structuration, elements are not fully subsumed in their
failed totality.  The totality comes after, and in addition to, its
constitutents, as an excess effect (reflection) of their differential
relating.  That effect is both real and impossible.  Real because it
expresses an integration of actual levels, matters, qualities, movements;
impossible because this expression unifies what is by nature multiple (as
opposed to split).  The unifying expression is self-expiring, and leaves
two remainders: Its constituents, again, in their diversity, in other
words minus one, minus the vehicle of unification (the autonomy of the
constituent, resurfaced; post-apocalyptic survival of the different).  And
the likelihood of its own repetition (the once-and-for-all, or the
one-for-all, turned automatism; the one-after befored; by force, not by
imagination).  The survival, or residual autonomy, of the constituent
elements expresses something besides: the potential for any and each of
them to be--in addition to (in-under or in the trees)--the point of
departure for other differential relatings, other integrations, leading
elsewhere (deflection) than murderous totality.  Just as really and
impossibly ... (pp.110-111) 

[btw, the essay goes on for a couple of more brief paragraphs but not
necessarily strictly applicable to matters here, and plus I am tired]

married, three cats, no dogs, one tree in the backyard 

Greg