From: colin.wright3-AT-virgin.net
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 1999 11:07:54 -0700
Subject: Re: the reality check is in the mail


hugh bone wrote:

> 
> Brent,
> 
> I think we all feel the the above obligation, and dialogue is fine,
> but we are in a public space, and compared to an organized meeting
> are definitely unorganized, for there would be a chairperson, unwritten
> and perhaps written rules.
> 
> So the etiquette is a little different on a List.
> 
> There are naturally different interests and different degrees of
> interest
> wrt the many ideas in Lyotard's work, and we tend to stray from his
> work, but eventually return.
> 
> Games and stakes and stragegies have been given a lot of attention
> lately, but there are many, many other Lyotardian ideas.
> 
> Our different interests produce different statments of opinion, which
> in turn draw counter-opinions or questions, and additional participants.
> 
> And the discussion can quickly become so diffuse, with so many names and
> books and other references being introduced that it sort of fizzles out.
> 
> The remedy is to inject new items, opinions or questions, when the one
> in progress is not the subject you're really interested in.
> 
> Hugh
> 
> ....Your self is the viewer of the movie of your life....
> 

Hugh,
      I personally find the preceeding posts highly relavent (although I
can see why you call for new topics: there is a certain tautologous
circularity returning eternally here). This on-going question of ruses
and the problematic of self-acclaimed winners, though, is absolutely
pivotal in how we take Lyotard. By his own terms, he does proffer a
model for a kind of praxis, and it is this which I think Brent is
performing with admirable awareness and honesty. Yes, we could easilly
introduce other topics, get back to some philosophical nuance in order
to tickle pleasantly our collective cerebellum - yet, Lyotard
consistently underlines the fact that his motivation is political, and,
in so doing, invites us to 'do' something. Brent is doing this
something, and Lois is responding in kind.
      I sense both you and Lois find this strategy of the ruse
frustrating. That is understandable. But in responding you always have
recourse, in your own ways, to ruses. Even when it is not the topic
under debate, it is still the form of the debate. My own intervention
here, of course, is another ruse. 
      Admittedly, Brent's mode of rusing is of the negative order: he
expressed a disinterest, and has deflected the (for him) tedius topic
ever since, and very sucessfully. Other ruses enable the smuggling in of
affirmative statements (I mean this grammatically, a differentiation
that must be made because ostensibly for Brent the success of his ruse
makes it affirmative from his point of view).
      Personally, I am very willing to view this process as endless. One
never really 'wins', since phrases are conditioned by subsequent phrases
(Brent himself admits of this injunction against having the last word).
One can 'win' for the duration of the currentness of a phrase, and
perhaps a little longer if the stake in that ruse was to engender
silence. But language always closes around silence, even if it cannot
erradicate it (Auschwitz). The notion of 'winning' would be an Idea of
the horizon of possible success, regulative of comportment within
dialogue, but never empirically actualizable. Brent's rueful admission
that his initial ruse would have been successful were it not for my
interference testifies to the fragility of every ruse. It is born of a
rather extreme temporality: no longer is winning predicated on having
the last word, but, contingently, on having always the next.
      Having qualified your suggestion, Hugh, that this discussion
should move on because of something of a stand-off between Lois and
Brent, I'd like to suggest that your suggestion is in fact a ruse
itself, even as it suprresses that thematic. This is an important
addition. Dialogue, certainly in its Socratic form, tends to be thought
of in terms of only two participants, mano e mano. If rusing were the
rule by which both speakers operated, the stand off that Brent and Lois
are experiencing would quickly become the norm. As a stasis, or
stability, this would represent a kind of 'winning' in which nobody but
contradicition is the winner: the deadend of agreeing to disagree.
However, both Hugh's and my consequent contributions expose the ideality
of this dialogic topology. In reality (where it counts) there is always
another voice, another ruse, another dispute, another contestation,
because it is not a closed system of two discourses clashing abruptly.
Rhetoric (and ruse is only a methodological manifestation of rhetoric)
allows the slipping and feigning of these moments of ossification, the
elision of stasis.
      Brent rightly foregrouds creativity in all of this. We should
remember that the ruse can take any form whatsoever, because its only
rule is the affect it has, by whatever means available. We need not even
stay within the paradigm of identitarian logic for example. Paradox,
aporia, self-contradiction, silence, nonsense, amphiboly, antinomy: all
of these strategies are available to us in the use of the ruse.
Operative behind Lyotard's schema here is always the model of aesthetic
Modernism - think of the diverse materials used by Dadaists, the
Situationists, the Fluxus collective and every individual artist who
wanted to displace the previous normative definition of what constituted
art. Their credo might be aphoristically termed: expression at any cost!
cheers,
Col