From: "Diane Davis" <ddd-AT-mail.utexas.edu>
Subject: RE: Give me some milk or else go home
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2002 10:26:19 -0500


I feel out of the loop, everyone: where is Lyotard's  "Music Mutic"?
Sounds like something I need to read! 

Thanks in advance,
~ddd

___________________________________________
  D. Diane Davis
  Division of Rhetoric (UT Mail Code B5500)
  Department of English
  University of Texas at Austin 
  Austin, TX 78712-1122 

  Office: 512.471.8765  FAX: 512.471.4353
  ddd-AT-mail.utexas.edu
  http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~davis

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu [mailto:owner-
> lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu] On Behalf Of Mary Murphy and Eric
Salstrand
> Sent: Monday, April 29, 2002 8:00 PM
> To: lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
> Subject: Give me some milk or else go home
> 
> 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
> 
> 
>