From: "Dan Haines" <dan.haines-AT-ntlworld.com>
Subject: Re: Logic of Simulacrum
Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2001 11:31:29 +0100


hi chris,

not that i have any problem with appearing contradictory,
but i wasn't really invoking deleuze as authoritative, i'm
just idly curious as to how to read that remark, made off
the cuff.  it wasn't an appeal to the 'real' authored
meaning.  i just think it's a funny thing to say (in either
sense)?

"socio-political significatory terms which have
 a distinct smell of liberal humanism"

not really! my comments were more based on a historical and
genealogical idea centred on elements like force and power,
and trying to think of language as articulated and assembled
upon specific historical political strata/ at particular
historical-political-material "conjunctures"?

the biunivocal overcoding of one alphabet onto another (A
onto a, B onto b...) seems to me a perfect example of what
d&g call "overcoding" in ATP.  it also seems to offer itself
up to a Nietzschean reading in terms of active-reactive
force or a master-slave power relationship, as reworked by
d&g into the concepts of _The Geology of Morals_?  the
alphabet has a secret fold.

??that's not especially, "liberal humanist", is it??

- most importantly, i wasn't saying capital letters were bad
or negative. i was just waxing lyrical when i talked about
instinctively cringing.  it was a joke!  my remarks on the
status of capital letters were , as i wrote, just a
(passing) thought:  an idle fancy that took me momentarily,
charmed me, made me laugh...

capital letters are great.  i love them deeply.  i refuse to
rage against my culture, which is also "me".  no repression,
no return, no alienation.  that's all just paranoid and
neurosis justified.  wretched.

fear of capital letters, of capitals, of capital, is just
_ressentiment_.

capital letters, capitals,  capital, never hurt anybody,
they're blameless, innocent, lovely.

"And if your hardness will not flash and cut and cut to
pieces: how can you one day - create with me? /
For all creators are hard.  And it must seem bliss to you to
press your hand upon millennia as upon wax, /
bliss to write upon the will of millennia as upon metal -
harder than metal, nobler than metal.  Only the noblest is
perfectly hard.

hard and written in Kapital letters, no doubt?


"Have I been understood? Capital (letters) against the
crucified!"


Capital against the crucified... ;-)

best,
dan
----------
"A great problem, deserving acute attention.
 I solved it by turning out the lights and going
to bed."                 - John Fante, Ask The Dust