File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1997/lyotard.9711, message 83


From: Ariosto Raggo <df803-AT-freenet.carleton.ca>
Subject: Re: [Fwd: The scandal of obligation]
Date: Sun, 30 Nov 1997 15:24:37 -0500 (EST)


William wrote that Arturo wrote:
> 
> Arturo wrote: 
> 
> What can I say. . . this is the problematic I was trying to raise and
> get at in all of my previous posts. . . the relation of Capital to time
> and the consequences of these for politics and not only for the
> "thinking of politics" or the "political". . .that Lyotard understands
> the events, phenomena, and social structures and logics you talk about
> here (fri. 28, 18:03) I do not doubt (again for me it is "Libidinal
> Economy" which is crucial here. . .).  But I find his responses based on
> turns towards Kant and Freud (and yes Levinas, et al) disappointing,
> problematic, unsatisfying, angering. . .whatever!  How is all of this
> stuff about "witnessing" etc. really a politics or a political response
> to all of this. . . to call it a "politics" seems to me an act of bad
> faith. . 
> 
> Reply:  I would say that in order to understand how it is a "politics"
> that one  merely has to recall that realm of politics is essentially 
> conflictual.  The problem for Lyotard is that the Marxist category of
> class conflict does not adequetly explain the forms of conflict taking
> place.  So as to explain this conflict he shifts from the "socially"
> based explantion to a "language" based explanation. (He does this in the
> PC.)  The view he adopts, I think is basically Wittgensteinian - that
> is, that all problems have their roots in lanaguage, and can be
> determined if not resolved by engaging in a grammatical investigation
> (an investigation of the way in which language is used "in situ" - a
> pragmatics). On this analysis, the basic conflict is between genres of
> discourse and the conflict concerns the linkage of phrases.  This may
> seem to be an "unreal" form of politics - one that is not dripping with
> blood - but if one accepts the basic premise that it is our use of
> "language" which as at the base all conflicts then it is not a big step
> to see how a concern with silence/differends might be a political
> concern.
> 
> Regards, William
> 

One could add that vigils and protest as an expression of silence is an
integral aspect of politics. And as a genre of phrasing, as my regime of
phrases how would such a protest be performed in a particular place even
if this place is not geographicaly situated? It seems to me that to some
extent I am habitually and already at this task when performatively I turn
a phrase across a space, or a stage challenging the most dogmatic of all
pretentions of phrasing which is that of telling the truth, of upholding
the sharpest distinction between truth and fiction. While protesting may be
impotent to some and certainly is hardly to change the world massively for
ever and ever; nevertheless it can be a moving gesture, a moving statement
that galvinizes action! Such is its virtue, its strength and potential.
Such a gesture or "touch" is what disposseses thematizing subjectivity
intent on hoarding time and shows its solidarity with the destitute of the
earth. Shows its solidarity not from the position of the articulate and
discursive always secure in their speech but from the absence of position
of those and that which has no voice, the broken and disturbed "residue"
of the earth. Such is that which constitutes a phrasing of differends, a
line of resistance.

With the destitute in phrasing,

Ariosto Raggo


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