Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 10:49:44 -0500 (EST)
From: TMB <tblan-AT-telerama.lm.com>
Subject: Re: race...  



Ariosto,

This stuff is how I am with this stuff. You should find some indication
and implications in my passages here to what is included of your post
following my comments. Even the notion of "break" is in question in the
process, or can be put in question. Not "against break", nor "for",
either. Both with and not with Heidegger, but that doesn't sum it up,
either, since it is in a certain way a "going deeper into Heidegger than
Heidegger does" (gasp!!!!). Sort of like Heidegger as cocoon, this stuff
as "butterfly" (the rhetoric of which is certainly available for strong
critique and aggravation of the way "butterfly" usually obtains: fragile,
"faggy", etc.) What do you think? This also indicates my reservations
about the Bataille list.

TMB

On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, Ariosto Raggo wrote:

> 
> Listen to what he says,
> 
> "The motif of revelation [strong with Heidegger at first but gradually
> withdrawn as an emphasis is placed on what remains hidden and therefore
> impossible to bring into any kind of disclosure, and so in some way,
> Heidegger can be said to agree with Levinas.], through death, of
> being-together or being-with [In that European, oblique style he doesn't
> say it but he mentions Heidegger here.], and of the crystallization of
> the community around the death of its members, _that is to say around
> the "loss" (the impossiblity) of their immanance_ [his emphasis] and
> not around their fusional assumption in some collective hypostasis,
> leads to a space of thinking incommensurable with the problematics of
> sociality or intersubjectivity (including the Husserlian problematic of
> the alter ego) within which philosophy, despite its resistance, has
> remained captive." (pg. 14)
> 

Ok, well I wonder about this approach. It is deteremined by a certain
negativity, "loss", "impossibility", and what is seen as "impossible" is
determined or characterized by a totality, unity, sheer positivity, even
if it is the "positivity" of death. Doesn't this sum up modernism,
hypermodernism, transmodernism, postmodernism, etc.? We see, on the one
hand, totality, on the other, a negation of it. This totality is developed
variously in Heidegger, but also in things like Levinas. Very much so,
even as he speaks against totality; the basic discourse contours, the
formulation, etc., of "the other", are all founded on a *mode of
generality* that arrogates into itself a sense of totality through and
through and through. Likewise, then, in Nancy: community, albeit,
impossible community (which doesn't obviate people making-possible anyhow,
what whatever price...) But this "community" is the "intersubjective"
counterpart to these other *gross* unities. The character is hard to hit
off, by the way, and that is one of its conditions of possility.

The character, to explicate it a bit more, is of a "gross unity".
Obviously, the "clarified self", one might say, the "whole self" of
Dasein's being towards death, viewed as a whole (one might suspect that
the holism in question would *not* arise as it does without Heidegger's
linkage between the two: death/whole, and either may be understood
holistically or otherwise than holistically). This strikes me as very
important. 

Ok, so we then think the communal correlate to this, etc., and come into
this sense of "loss", etc. What is assumed is that in the first moment,
"we all go rushing toward the gross whole". I myself don't, didn't. And I
did, do. Both. On the contrary side, I went rushing from it whenever I
have approached it, as I felt, at every turn that it was accomplishing a
great violence. In this basic attunement, we have, always: gross whole,
then: shattering, or, fascism, or shattering by the fact or possibility of
fascism, or, reevaluated fascism (right on, man!), etc. In every case
these moves are founded on a basis of "attunement", but I am going to work
this basis more directly now.

I generally am going to refer to this "basis" using a provisional term:
the "chromatics of being", the "chromatic range", etc. This is a
metaphysical or quasi-metaphysical notion (just as is "tune", "attune",
etc.), kept within limits, but denoting the basic kinds of mood-ranges,
fluencies of mood-change, the range of particular moods, states, etc.,
that serve as the *ground* for whatever opening of world's, etc. there may
be. This is subject oriented. Even as the notion of *subject*, according
to its tendency towards *gross unity*, according to a stylistics that are
themselves founded on a gross unity, I am admitting of this particular
style and tendency here (a textual/discursive/thematic correlate to
"resolute attunement", a certain scientificity, etc.). This is different
from "stylistic range", because it keeps in some contact with a notion of
*ground*. Why and if this is important isn't clear here to me, but I'm
going to keep with this. 

Ok. So we now address the issue of chromatic range. In this regard, the
"subject" has not been opened up much. The notion of subject itself is
itself grounded in one "attunement" and concomitant *style* of the
chromatic range. In any event, the *object* orientation still perdures in
the general thematics of subjectivity and of community (arising, as it
does, out of one phase, a very workman-like one, of the chromarange). This
leads then to breakdown or negation issues in terms of "loss",
"decentering", etc. Still in all, the chromatic range issue isn't opened
up much, as far as I can see. And that is part in parcel with the
positivity and its simple negation.

If we go "back" (as if one were there in some "first place") to chromatic
range, from here we can begin to see some major issues. First of all,
"chrmarange" itself is an emergence out of the "chromatic range" (now
partly under erasure) through one attunment. We could use "attunement
range" for this, too. We use it here in a very provsional capacity. I say
"we" here as just a "service" we, for that matter: "we, anyone going along
this line of thiking", not "we, the group, a community, or Mankind, or
whatever". 

But from here, then, the question is of the forms of the chromarange or
attunement range, which is not to say that that it doesn't entail "the
question of style" ala Derrida, Nietzsche, etc., as well. In any event,
the gross wholism and its precipitations into (as if it were operating
"outside"), or, let us say, its constitution within "subjectivity",
"selfhood", "community", the thought of "The Other", remains, to a certain
extent, unopened. I have remembered, here and now. to mention nonviolence,
and have thus done so. 

Generally speaking, if we return to the chromarange and think community,
we have an initial differentiation between "preciptitations" (I'll use
thsi here despite my reservations). Those which are founded on this or
that range. In general, then, a second differentiation occurs. Those
founded on a static and unified chromarange and those not. Then, those
founded on a maintenance (conservatism, a certain status quo) and those
founded on a shattering ("left", variously, including, perhaps, Nancy).
I'm not trying to spell out an actual taxonomy here. But we have to add:
those which include a sense of the chromarange (closed, centered
((Heidegger)), open, etc.), that is to say, those which are reflective on
this dimension. And then, also, with or without nonviolence as such. 

This is all in part to lay open some other basic possibilties, vis a vis
community, as well as my particular preferences or ideals, goods, etc. I
favor: a wide chromatic range. In a wide range, we do not have to go
through the laborious process of an original positivity that proceeds
forward unimpeded by chromashift, nor its realization into "Community",
"communitas" (to coin a word?), "fascism", nor its breakdown into
unavowable or impossible community, which still appears to be founded,
even with its emphases on "memory" in the inclusion of a first moment of
the "unimpeded positivity" that, above all, lacks reflection in the manner
of opening chromatic range. In Heiegger, all issues of "attunement" are
directed under the general them of "mastery" (mastry of moods) and
"resoluteness", and stylistically, well, Heidegger's style of workmanship
in philosophy, forward progression (relentless at times, other times a bit
supple, but within a restricted range, etc.), or the various modes that
are preciptations into *examples* (workship, shoes, labor, tools,
everydayness, *Moment* with a capital M) and substantivities (themes in
general, etc.), modes of text (generality, desubstantialization,
reductions, etc.), etc. 

One should understand "resoluteness" as *one* mode of the chromatic range,
like (or as) "seriousness". But likewise, I find the various turns on
this, historically, to *still* be founded utterly on a variation of this
basic chrome: irony (highly lodged in the same), laughter, embattlement,
sarcasm, etc. None of these are inherently bad. The general movement:
positive/negative, even: construction/deconstruction is bad, as far as I
can see. it shouldn't be, but it works out that way.

Anyhow, from here, one might as: how does the opening of chromarange enble
thinking community otherwise than the above two main poles? I'll save that
for another post.

TMB



> So, he is with and against Heidegger.
> 
> I can get into this some more later if I feel inclined but as far as I
> am concerned immanance as I said is the fusion of the identity of a
> people around the transmission of a cultural identity or memory, you
> can see now, perhaps being too oblique, how important is Nietzsche's
> notion of active forgetting specially when read through guys like
> Klossowsky, Blanchot, and Bataille. If the list opens up a bit and
> tries to BREAK the tendency to always stay really close to Heidegger, in an
> almost sycophantic attachement, then without a doubt things could get
> more interesting. With regards to the normative historicist approach where
> what seems revelant is what Heidegger was doing in this or that situation
> in this or that time, not only does that step out of the importance of
> countinuing to plug away at a meditative practice such as that of
> resolute attunement or active forgetting for that matter, but it also
> forgets at least two hundred years of hermeneutic studies. That
> approach was dealt with a long time ago. REFERENCE: Kierkegaard
> _Unconcluding Scientific Postscript_. You might as well try to find out
> what kind of cereal he was eating professors. rant. rant. rant.
> 
> Let me try to relax a minute here, I am getting very anxious.
> 
> So the CBC has these cultural heritage ads that I am sure you guys are
> familiar with, usually they are French, Asian, or Native oriented and
> rarely mixed as if we all needed to stay separate and protect our own
> territories, as if I couldn't talk about Native self-government and
> shamanic circles because I don't have red blood, etc..
> 
> There--you have the recycling of the memory banks, the archives.
> 
> Political struggle henceforth is about MEMORY.
> 
> Another thing, the greatest Canadian cultural export is clearly comics,
> we are good at making people laugh guys, so RELAX a bit.
> 
> my two cents worth,
> Crazy Feathers,
> Ariosto
> 



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