File spoon-archives/french-feminism.archive/french-feminism_1996/96-07-07.000, message 114


From: ssliwinski-AT-accel.net (Sharon Sliwinski)
Subject: Zen to save Paris!
Date: Thu, 27 Jun 1996 22:04:16 -0500


This is a most complex line of thought! (in fact i'm having a little trouble
muddling it through). This bit for example:

>Performance is only possible within the constraints of the iterable; it 
>is "precisely the reiteration of norms" in which the 
>repetition/reiteration is not performed *by* a subject but is rather 
>what enables a subject to come into being at all (Bodies that Matter 
>95). (There is, as Nietzsche says, no being behind doing...no subject 
>behind the performance one engages when one answers an Althusserean 
>hail.) 

Ok. But taken to its logical end, what is left? Are people then nothing but
their performance? Do i not exist except by the "impressions" i leave? (see
what i mean? there's no language to describe this) One phrase catchs me in
particular: "repitition is not performed *by* a subject but is rather what
enables a subject to come into being?" Because i am wearing a blue shirt and
have a pointy nose does that make me *only* a blue shirt and pointy nose? I
think we (in general) are stuck velcro-like on an old idea of "being." Or
perhaps we're on the temultuous edge of reinventing what "being" is... 

what is being? 

>None of our performances have the capacity to be a matter of intentional 
>production nor 'pure' subversion. But that doesn't make them less 
>subversive, even in their complicity.  Performativity, Butler notes, 
>means being implicated in what one opposes and forging ahead anyway, 
>recognizing that "the incalculable effects of action are as much a part 
>of their subversive promise as those we plan in advance" (241).

and later, 

>Nietzsche comes to mind again: "what could I say 
>about any essence except to name the attributes of its appearance!" (Gay 
>Science #54).

Essence, subjects, objects. This is very deconstructist. It reminds me of
Derrida's new one, _Spectors of Marx_. He uses the case of Hamlet to say
that people/societies are "players"; that we all get created out of the past
-- like Hamlet whose life is shaped by his father's ghost's request. We all
are playing to the spectors of our past roles. Very "spiritual" (also very
anti-capitalist. However.) My big problem with deconstruction is its
destructive nature. Kind of like an autopsy. Great, you've discovered how
the person was killed, exactly what kind of poison, at what time, etc etc.
But their "wholeness", the certain specialness that accompanies a whole body
is lost. Woolf describes it as the "luminous envelope" that is life (such
sublime language! where has it gone?). And reconstruction is useless because
its sort of hypocritical. Like archeology too i suppose. To discover the
wonders of the past in a site, you have to destroy it in excavation.  

>Post-structural thought in general is itself 
>pretty much after that which any given structure must exclude for the 
>sake of its own stability.

This is exactly it. But like your Foucault quotation, and like Hamlet, we
are stoped dead in the knowledge that we *know*. There's that moment of
knowing knowing which causes the deadly hesitation; the imobilization until
we must act, we must perform the role, which like Hamlet and like Venus,
ends us in tragedy. 

[btw, it occurs to me the Zen Budhists have realized this a long time ago
and discarded the path. (I don't know where/how that one fits in!?)]

>I'll stop here.  Anyway, thanks for opening up this conversational 
>space, Sharon. 
>
>ddd

Hmm. i think i had little to do with such a rich outpour!

ss




   

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