Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1998 19:54:43 -0600
From: Wynship Hillier <whi-AT-wenet.net>
Subject: Re: Wynship's proposals


> It seems to me that if you want to understand production -- the joy of
> production -- you'd be much better off reading Deleuze and Guattari then
> reading Lacan.

Thanks for the suggestion, but I am
interested in reading critically about
the will
to mastery.  You've elided this with
production, and I don't think this
elision
applies.  Furthermore, from what little
I have read of Anti-Oedipus, it seems
that
"production" machinery are being used
there as an ontological metaphor, and
are not
being read critically, but are rather
being used to criticise capitalism and
oedipalization.  So, even if the elision
fits, I'm headed in the wrong direction.
Thanks, anyway.

> It seems to me that you are using the wrong tool to do
> the job with.  Is understanding not a job, and does one not have to select
> the right tool?

My objective was actually to question
immediate reduction of all things to
jobs and
tool-use, which seems so prevalent in
intellectual life, these days.  Your
immediate, uncritical participation in
this reductionism is an example of it. 
Do
you use tools to understand poetry or
art?

> Which, of course, brings up the question of how, once
> one has begun to oedipalize, one would exclude from this oedipalization
> the desire to understand things, and using tools to do so, and wanting
> to establish a discussion list.

*sigh* Who said anything about
oedipalization?  If you are taking the
construction
of an imago (what I wrote about) as
oedipalization (what you wrote about),
then
Lacan is neither a Freudian nor a
structualist, and that has got to be the
most
radical rereading of Lacan I have ever
seen.  You should publish.  You would
turn
the intellectual world on its head.

As for understanding things, and using
tools to do so, I'll defer to Heidegger,
who
wanted to "understand", though probably
in a different sense than you mean it,
not
things but thinging.  As for using tools
to do so, I wonder if everything is not,
to you, some form of tool for the
relentless manifestation of your will. 
As for
wanting to establish a discussion list,
believe me, my desire is waning.

> In your framework, is the will to
> think through the world, the will to interact with it -- for example, through
> the insertion into it of anti-engineering -- not also the apotheosis of the
> father figure?   What in this rich world of human actitvity can _not_ be
> reduced to the phantom of the father figure?

For you, perhaps, everything can be
reduced to the smooth efficiency of the
imago
and the imaginary, but for Lacan, this
would be evidence of the very absence of
what he calls "the name of the father",
its very foreclosure.  So, to answer
your
question, it is the very world you are
proposing, where everything can be
reduced
to tool-use and the actions of knowing,
self-grounded subjects, that cannot be
reduced to the Lacanian
name-of-the-father, the other, or the
subject of the
unconscious.

I take great care to respond to every
point you raise and would appreciate
very
much if you would show me a similar
kindness.

Yours,
Wynship Hillier, Incorporated
by Wynship Hillier, President