File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1999/lyotard.9907, message 196


From: colin.wright3-AT-virgin.net
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1999 18:09:00 -0700
Subject: Re: Trusting liars to lie


Lois Shawver wrote:
> 
> Colin,
> 
> I can see why you don't want to abandon the word "ruse." It is central
> to your appreciation of Lyotard.  And I think you give it the vernacular
> meaning, too, which means cunning, deceptive, sly ways of ____ doing
> what?  What is the success of the ruse?  Not consensus surely with the
> one that succumbed to the cunning of the person performing the ruse.
> 
> In my interpretation, Lyotard was inspired with another notion and the
> connotation of slyness is incidental.  He says that the ruse is a new
> langauge game.  It is what dissolves a differend.  It is the paradigm
> shift.
> 
> As you describe "ruse" it sounds the preferred game of the embezzler or
> thief.  How would you differentiate it from that kind of game?
> 
> ..Lois Shawver

Lois,
     You ask what the succes of a ruse is. This is impossible to answer
in the generalised abstract. A ruse is a strategy for achieving an end,
a vehical for it. The end can be absolutely anything, including
consensus. You say:
Not consensus surely with the one that succumbed to the cunning of the
person performing the ruse.
Why not consensus? If the one succumbing disagreed, don't forget, this
would not be a consensus, which is always shared. This succumbing to the
cunning of the ruse can be, precisely, the establishing of a consensus.
In fact, I would say that this is the most common type of ruse there is.
Every time you gain the sense of a statement, or even a word, you are
succumbing to the cunning of a ruse. The word persuades you of its
sense, and necessarilly by artifice. There must be words, or phrases, or
language in general, because there is always an abyss between
interllocuters. There is no such thing as a transparent communication,
no such thing as a pure signified. One must give the sense one wishes to
transmit a plastic, mediatory form -the signifier- and then send this
across the abyss. It seems to me (and I may well be wrong) that you have
the notion that there is no such abyss between interllocuters, that they
can somehow meet each other in a moment of pure and unmediated contact.
      Your metaphors of the 'thief' and the 'embezzler' are very
interesting to me, and substantiate, to me at least, that you have a
notion of a pure signified. The thief steals. This implies the notion of
property. Whose property is being stolen? What property is taken from
the victim of a linguistic ruse? The effort to agree on a referent is
undertaken precisely because it is LACKING in one of the interllocuters
- the ABSENCE of a common referent is the motivation in discussion. How
can you 'steal' an absence? Only by giving. Communication is always a
giving, even when the gift is negative. The notion of an 'embezzler' is
a more economic version of the 'thief'. Again, you resort to it because
you feel that there is a property available to be embezzled, a propriety
not to be transgressed. Who owns language? Neither you nor me. It is the
mediating space we meet up in, but neither of us posseses it. Possession
is the beginning of piety. 
      "Pagans never ask whether a narrative conforms to its object; they
know that references are organized by words, and that the gods do not
guarentee them because their word is no more to be trusted that the word
of man." ('Lessons in Paganism', p. 137 in 'The Lyotard Reader' ed.
Andrew Benjamin.)  
Cheers
Col

   

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