From: Ariosto Raggo <df803-AT-freenet.carleton.ca>
Subject: Re: The Gnostic Artist
Date: Wed, 28 Jan 1998 13:21:26 -0500 (EST)



 Edward wrote:
  In 
> the former, one is said to deserve death when he or she ceases to be 
> human; the term "inhuman monster" is often applied to violent criminals.  
> This is metaphorical, but it seems to say that when one ceases to embody 
> the human ideal, one is no longer worthy of life.  

I am still thinking about your first post, particularly with regards to
how you think about possibility and purity. I have been meaning to respond
but this or that holds me back.I just want to make a brief remark that I
will expand  on in due time. It seems to me that one of the approaches to
aesthetics that Lyotard is displacing is an idealizing one where the
monstrosity of life if you will is smooth out, beautified or can one say
that this is what the word "aesthetic" refers too? Also I think he would
say that this implies a process of harmonization, and identificatory
consensus around an ideal type -- what Lacoue-Labarthe would call an
onto-typology to which he 'opposes' a mimesis without model and so a more
modern or vanguard aesthetics. But why did I put opposes in warning
quotes? I think because one of the things that writers like Lyotard and
Lacoue-Labarthe are conecerned with is not to too decidedly, too
resolutely try and make a break from the voraciousness of speculative
dialectics that depends on this identification or consensus around an
exemplary model that supposedly shapes us, fictions us -- indeed it
constitutes the very meaning of an "us." A good question perhaps is wether
and how this process of consensus implies that we are put as speakers in
the instance of an adressee pretending to the passage of an informative
message that would be decipherable, interpretable by those of us who have
the keys, who share the same model kultur, who have the _same memory_?
Those this imply, furthermore, a contingent of monsters who are impossible
to shape into good model citizens? Perhaps artistic practice (which
Lyotard has distinguished from cultural activity for the reasons i have
hinted at above) doesn't have precisely to do with "purity" but with a
more cancerous spread of contagion by pests, ticks, bugs, scum, garbage of
the earth and other leaches of found objects impossible to recycle.

a-tzu! excuse me



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