Subject: Re: race...
Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 18:41:12 -0500 (EST)


> 
> 
> 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

  As regards the "break," perhaps letting this word resonnate with
"ecstasy" which I said answers, according to Nancy and it seems the way
to go to me, let's say it was a necessary display of a temporary
rapture or deterritorialization. Being applied, of course, to various
communicative (im)possibilities. Well, if you think the cocoon
rhetoric, or more scholarly, the autoreferential quasi-narcissitic
thing (I could go into Kristeva's _Tales of Love_, maybe later.) makes
itself available to strong critique, here I am, take your best shot,
don't hold back, take me apart. Explode! Why would you have
reservations Tom? I just can't understand this, maybe you can help me
out and explain yourself a little more.

 > 
> 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 withdrawn as an emphasis is placed on what remains hidden and therefore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.?
  
	I don't know, big words, don't use them myself, I don't even
bother with the word "deconstruction." Derrida is too much of a hog
with it, tries to circumscribe it too much. Best not to label, to start
with anyways, what you are looking at, or becoming more interested in?

 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.
> 
  First, yes, certainly we are headed towards Levinas in part.
Obviously his reading of Heidegger is inadequate and not to be taken
seriously and even bothered with anymore. Everybody knows it, no big
secret, yet he has much to offer if instead of looking for a polemic,
we try to look for possible grafts where him and Heidegger come closer
to each other. I am looking at grafting resolute attunement with
Levina's notion of assignment which as I have suggested I read as a
meditative practice and not some grasping, comprehensive
understanding--it is what in the mystical literature one would call
naked intentionality (there is even suggestions of this in Husserl).
This, it seems to me, pomotes a unilateral disarmament of consc. and
also non-violence as you would put it? A couple of years ago we were
also talking about Levinas were we not?

Since the importance of reading Lyotard has been raised and put on the
table, later, i can write a few lines on his work on Heidegger and the
"Jews," but I wanted to flesh out a bit this concept (In Deleuze's
sense as you find it in _What is Philosophy?_) of disarming consc. and
how it relates to avant-garde culture, so I am answering your question
a little bit about what big word we could apply to this approach and
why not other words like Baroque? which is where my interests are to
some extent.

There is papers all over the place, so messy, I am going to have to
continue by memory.

The important thing about what we learn from reading Lyotard with
regards to the avant-garde is that the emphasis is not on newness or
novelty but on *making events happen, what Nancy would call ecstasy.
Lyotard suggest the juxtaposition of this movement with Heidegger's
notion of _Ereignis_ which makes us come out so to speak. See how
Baroque and flamboyant it's getting? I must admit I like flames. I am
all for Hereclitus, the importance of Agon, that resitance of writers
which in muslim culture is called Jihad Al-Qalam. So here is some
contradiction with the nonviolence part because it seems important to
know how to interrupt when necessary and that means violence, good
thing we have a screen between all of us who are from so many different
cultural
backgrounds, different racial, sexual, spiritual, political interest.
The important thing to some extent, since complete frankness seems
impossible, is to lay your interests on the table without hiding in
obscure scholarly, impersonal jargon for starters. You always do this
of course, I am always aware of engaging a personality.

I am all for a dehistoricizing dialectical materialism (somewhat along
the lines of Zizek and Agamben)

I am reading from Lyotard's _The Sublime and the Avant-garde_.
I will continue this as the evening rolls along and my energy and
enthusiasm stays with me.

Ariosto

> 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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