From: "Chris McMahon" <pharmakeus-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Carnivalic D&G
Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2000 00:34:03 GMT


Dear Michael,

That's indeed possible. But I can't buy it. If you mean that genres don't 
really exist. I can't buy that. If you mean that genres appear as the result 
of connective syntheses, sure. But what doesn't? Genres are "families". They 
are restricted economies where membership is accorded by *descent* (and 
where descent is recognized in terms of a family resmblance ... if only 
*negative* [in Weber's sense] ... from which we can see that the problem of 
keeping a genre pure, or reading via genre, is the same as that which 
applies to any resticted economy).

>Might it not rather be simply the case that genre distinctions
>presuppose a genus/species (i.e., universal/particular) distinction,
>one which proceeds from an illegitimate (non-specific) use of
>the connective synthesis.

In fact, the idea of genre can just as easily presupposes the opposite. I 
could mention Foucault's idea of "discourse", a more linear and serial idea 
than genre, but with the same sort of relation to the "undifferentiated 
corpus" of text as the one I am proposing (and which, I think, is understood 
by JD too). More radical by far (at least by today's standards) is the much 
older idea that the genres are actually much greater than any individual 
writer or thinker, that in the "tragic" or "comic" we do not find human 
creations, but rather the cosmic laws in which divine figura must dwell. It 
is this older idea that I think you are responding to (you can read about it 
in Auerbach *Scenes from the Drama of European Literature* ... and before 
simply rejecting the idea, might want to have another look at what Heidegger 
has to say about *Plato's Doctrine of Truth*). I say this "older" idea is 
more radical because it flys in the face of what is more *normal*: the idea 
that humanity makes its own world. On the other hand, what do we mean by 
*all is flows*? It strikes me that *flows* are much greater than any person, 
or any mode of production, or any restricted economy? If that's so, would it 
not make good sense to reconsider this idea of the *regulation of flows* 
from the other side? When the medievals thought of figura as more real than 
the mere representation of figura, they understood the great inhumanity of 
God, not merely the way humanity has been crafted in His "divine image". 
Perhaps we should reconsider this idea that genres are not simply 
constructs, but that constructs merely reply to a sort of *urgenre* that is 
properly Ideal, like the way each de facto state replies to the primordial 
Urstaat? Such an inquiry would be radical indeed in the current 
postFoucauldian climate. And a reading of *Rabelais and his world* (where 
the medieval and the postmodern seem to find some juncture) might not be 
such a bad place to begin?

>To be honest, all I can see in Derrida is a protracted meditation upon
>a historically prevalent but nonetheless botched reading of Schelling.

Not having read enough Schelling to comment, I won't. I have been intending 
to get into some Schelling for awhile. Could you explain what you mean at 
more length? Are you talking about what Harold Bloom famously called the 
"anxiety of influence"? That little Oedipal drama so necessarty to the very 
idea of genre? If so then what we might actually be discussing is the 
followup on "Does Castration Exist" (i.e. does Oedipus exist)?

However, can I ask you what you think of *Plato's Pharmacy* (in 
*Dissemination*), or what you think of *The Gift of Death* (both of which I 
think are very fine works)? Again, while it is interesting that you wish to 
deconstruct Derrida re: Schelling, or "genre" re the BwO, what is even more 
interesting is the techniques which you are using - techniques that seem to 
me to be thoroughly Derridean?

But can I say that what you really seem to be objecting to is the idea of 
genre as opposed to discourse? What elese could be at stake for a person who 
says that JD is just Schelling's bad son and who introduces the idea in 
opposition to the idea of genre as an "illegitimate (non-specific) use" of 
labels? Could it be that what you really want is a Foucauldian genaeology 
that could link ATP to *Gargantua* in terms of some "legitimate" descent? If 
so we should remember what D&G say about BwOs being utterly 
antigenaeological? Or is it the case that you want ATP to appear as a virgin 
birth? Surely an anal preganancy would be more appropriate - and how utterly 
Rabbelaisian that notion is!

:) Chris
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