From: "Lois Shawver" <rathbone-AT-california.com>
Subject: RE: Against the Grain
Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2002 21:10:15 -0800


So, let me see if I understand Judy and Eric.  You are pointing to the
way in which language inevitably totalizes in a political way.  If I
were to sketch this out into a model of the way language works, you are
saying that language simplifies what it represents pretending that there
is no differAnce, nothing that is hidden behind the simplification. All
we can do, a la Derrida, is learn to deconstruct the binary that we
totalize.  Then, at least, we can at least become aware of the truths
that are hidden behind the totalizing binaries.  But this is an
exception.  Since the Enlightenment, we have been completely stuck in
these mesmerizing binaries and we are helpless to free ourselves.  We
are caught in using using this artificial picture of the world to
represent it, and we will inevitably use it to try to get others to see
it our way, which they might, if they deconstruct their present picture
of the world.

I'm sure I must have things wrong here as to what you mean, at least a
little around the edges.  Please correct.  I could have re-read you
each, but I think a conversational back and forth is more fun at the end
of a long day.  I did read you, and with much interest.

..Lois Shawver



-----Original Message-----
From: owner-lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
[mailto:owner-lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu]On Behalf Of Mary&Eric
Murphy&Salstrand
Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2002 12:00 AM
To: lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Subject: Against the Grain


Against the grain

Even though it remains true, as Hugh and Richard point out, the act of
totalizing has political implications, I agree with Judy that this
appears
to be merely a specific instance of a much more general rule.

Totalization remains imbedded in the very structure of language itself.
If
I say the word "tree" I am immediately confronted with a universal
entity
of almost Platonic dimensions.  As Lyotard puts it in "The Differend",
"there exists no protocol for establishing the reality of the universe,
because the universe is the object of an idea."

>From my own antiquarian, pre-structuralist perspective, I tend to see
this
problem of totalizing rhetoric as embedded in the very notion of the
Enlightenment itself.

Certainly for Kant, the purpose of critique was to question the
transcendental illusion of metaphysics by stating lucidly the limits of
reason.  Since that time there have been opposing armed camps
confronting
one another across the Western front.

There are the Hegelians of various stripes who invoke the Absolute just
as
there are  traditionalists who invoke God. All of these remain
monotonous
monotheists of varying stripes. Against them remain the guerilla forces
of
diverse anti-totalizing polytheists whose vagrant thoughts must
sometimes
brush against the grain of language.

I have followed with some interest the renewed discussion here of the
topic
of the cyborg.  I want to restate an observation I previously made.  If
the
cyborg signifies the interface between animal and machine as most
definitions demand then humans have always been cybrogs because language
is
the original prosthetic.  So-called human culture represents the first
stirrings of virtual reality.  Plato's parable of the cave as a first
draft
of the Matrix.

The interesting contemporary question regarding the cyborg is why there
has
been this historical transition from totalization (with its obvious
survival value) to something else. Why is this occurring in the most
Darwinian sense of the word.

In a banal sense it would appear the grafted technologies of reason and
language are currently allowing us to undergo a kind of species
differentiation in a way that resembles the diversity of color
pigmentation
in a butterflies wings - the myriad specific adaptations to
multifariously
diverse environments. In poetic terms it even echoes William Carlos
Williams famous dictum - "no ideas except in things."

At the same time, however, this development is modified by an alien
awareness that the immediate is not the totality - what I would name,
echoing Diogenes, the cosmopolitan.

The difference between totalization and the cosmopolitan lies in the
difference between the gestalt plane of uniformity occupied by the
former
and the ironic sense of epistemological bilocation enjoyed by the
latter.

It is this felt sense of being both here and elsewhere that marks the
cosmopolitan, a paradoxical sense of occupying heterogeneous realms
simultaneously, the strange loop of awareness bending back upon itself.

 If this situation seem familiar it is because it mirrors the conflict
which Kant and Lyotard both named the sublime.  It differs from
totalization to the same extent that feelings differ from knowledge.

Wittgenstein once described the experience of life as being that of a
limited whole.  Such an experience can only be felt.  It cannot be
known.
>From the point of view of logic, the experience remains one of austere
nonsense.

To paraphrase Pascal - the heart has its hallucinations of which the
hallucinations of reason know nothing.

The cyborg is a monkey with a dream machine that calibrates itself to
the
vast encounters of alien worlds. A bastard child of instrumental reason,
lost in space and forgetful of itself in the aporias of Paradise.

eric