File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2002/lyotard.0205, message 52


From: "Mary Murphy  and Eric Salstrand" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: Community as a fiction
Date: Tue, 14 May 2002 21:30:36 -0500


Steve,

I hope we can explore this some more and perhaps others will jump in as
well. Given the obvious, that the virtual community cannot simply be
reduced to the Internet, what relationship does the virtual have with the
imagined community? What are the differences between the two concepts? How
in turn do they relate to the inoperative community of Nancy or the coming
community of Agamben?

In the attempt to expand a little on what I previously said, let me clarify
a little more what I mean by the virtual. I am working primarily with
Deleuze's conception here. As he writes in his book "Bergsonism: "The
virtual...does not have to be realized, but rather actualized; and the
rules of actualization are not those of resemblance and limitation, but
those of difference or divergence and of creation."

What is interesting to me about this book is that Deleuze directly
discusses the relationship between fiction and community I referred to in
my last post, but he does so in a much more negative fashion. He writes:
"And while society makes itself obeyed, it is thanks to the story-telling
function, which persuades the intelligence that it is in its interest to
confirm the social obligation." 

In Deleuze's view for Bergson both intelligence and instinct result in a
closed society and "only emotion differs in nature from both intelligence
and instinct, from both intelligent individual egoism and quasi-instinctive
social pressure."

I would interpret this creative emotion of which Deleuze speaks as being
related to the social imaginary in the positive sense of re-writing the
story. Through art and this re-writing, a virtual space is opened in which
the ordinary narratives of the ordinary story-telling function are
dis-rupted, dis-placed and de-layed. This allows the movement from the
virtual to the actual to occur and the reaction to this event in turn
allows a new virtual to re-emerge in order to repeat the process.

As Deleuze writes: "This liberation, this embodiment of cosmic memory in
creative emotions, undoubtedly only takes place in privileged souls. It
leaps from one soul to another "every now and then" crossing closed
deserts...and from soul to soul, it traces the design of an open society, a
society of creators, where we pass from one genius to another, through the
intermediary of disciples or spectators or hearers...Memory then appears as
the coexistence of all the degrees of difference in this multiplicity, in
this virtuality."

Thus, the vital links in the community as a fiction are memory, the
imaginary and creative emotion. Through these elements something novel
occurs that breaks with the violence of tradition and the grim Law of the
elders. 

eric  



   

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