From: "Mary Murphy  and Eric Salstrand" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: Give me some milk or else go home
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2002 20:4:22 -0500


Diane, Glen, Hugh, Rod, All:

In his essay on Joyce's Ulysses, entitled "The Return upon the Return"
Lyotard makes the following remarks about community:

"It is not enough to consider Bloom as a historian or a sociologist, as the
literary counterpart of urbanization in progress. He is also and
especially, I believe (with Benjamin), the return of solitude, of the
desert, of inoperativity at the heart of the community.  The modern city is
the operativity (oeuvre) in the bosom of which the community and the
individual are deprived of their artwork (oeurve) by the hegemony of market
value. Far from being a free city, Joyce's Dublin is, to use Jean-Luc
Nancy's words, an inoperative community."

And as Rod alluded to with regard to a herd of cows mooing, in "Music,
Mutic" Lyotard writes:

"The community forgets the anonymous horde moaning with the terror of no
longer being.  The community, however, does not efface the horde."

Certainly, as Hugh pointed out, any conception of community is problematic
and as Diane said, community cannot be limited to the city alone, but
rather is prior to urbanization and always already complaisant with
technology.

However, as Rob points out, if there is a tension between the community and
infancy, then what Diane calls contact and what Lyotard calls the touch
marks the site of our originary inscription. If this signifies our entrance
into community, it is also marks our entrance into bilocation. Henceforth,
we will carry the solitude, desert, inoperativity with us into the city as
Janus-faced citizens, mute barbarians who must wear masks, strangers taught
to speak an alien tongue, Cain masquerading as Abel.

What Lyotard names the Differend is nothing more than a kind of "return of
the repressed" of the enfans, the horde, the silent witness who always
betrays us. Any conception of community which does not recognize the
conflictual nature that underlies it (like Romulus and Remus) implicitly
argues for terror, the violent smoothing over of differences, the enforced
silence of the phrase.

In "Just Gaming" Lyotard refers to, even though he doesn't name,
autonomists such as Negri who argue in a similar fashion with regard to
community. They claim that workers have an autonomous power that transcends
capitalism and which is the source of resistance. They regard the enfans,
in other words, as both real and heroic.

Lyotard differs from autonomists like Negri insofar as he emphasizes
instead the weakness, the manceps instead. Perhaps, as Rob has said, this
is the part of us, like Peter Pan, that refuses to grown up. Perhaps also
it is that part which is incapable of growing up, which is why it is called
the intractable, the rock we carry like a millstone around our necks, the
weight of time itself, the burden of re-membering.

Lyotard offers us the heteronomous community, to which we can only bear
false witness. In this weakness lies our strength, only let's not be pious
about it. Rather, the common sense of the pagan requires that she makes a
ruse.

eric