Date: Fri, 17 May 2002 18:35:07 +1100 From: hbone <hbone-AT-optonline.net> Subject: Re: Wildcard: Skin and Constitution Comments at ** Rod wrote: > Eric/all: > > You are exactly right Eric. My thesis is an attempt to do just that through > the theme of embodiment. I had promised some citations. And I will give > them. First, though, I would like to share my own experience of trying to > write about these later pieces and The Differend. > > At the end of this semester, I tried to write a seminar paper on just one > small essay in Toward the Postmodern ("On 'What the Art' " or "Desordre: > Valery, in Lectures d'enfance). I realized, having read The Differend, that > the essay was in part a response to it. I found that I could not write the > essay without recounting so many things that were going on in The Differend > that doing this almost outweighed the my writing on the Valery. **Some of the many things going on are new approaches to conventional philosophy, including conventional postmodernism.. Philosophers and scientists are concerned with basic quiestions such as: 1)What is Nature? 2)What is Man and his relationship to Nature? 3) What is Man in relation to others? Or, in summary, knowledge of nature, self, and society. In discussions of "body", "being", "feeling" "idiolect", Lyotard approaches the domains of neurology, science of mind, consciousness and unconsciousness. The priority of language - language precedes newborns. They do not choose - language chooses them, so to speak. Persons are situated. Situations choose persons Literally? perhaps not, but how else account for "awaiting", and the "is it happening". > This a peculiar quality that the book has (as Lyotard himself expresses in > the reading dossier: it can only be read slowly, and reread, and reread). > Perhaps this is another reason for the lack of commentary. The Differend is > an intense book. I think if you take it seriously, along with the later > writings, something like a nervous breakdown will come over you. I'm sure > someone on the list will jump on me for this, **just say there are anxieties with which it is extremely difficult to cope. but that seems to be what he > means when mentions, as he does often in The Inhuman and else, anxiety, > enfance, affect (in The Differend, the term was silence, look to the > Gertrude Stein notice and the paragraphs surrounding it for that, also no. > 43 I think): these are that which is intractable in us. Sometimes he calls > it a form of resistance. That is because the rapidity and semantics bereft > of tone that "development" demands finds anxiety as its last and total > enemy. Why won't computers ever think as we do? Because they have never been > born, have never been affected in the strong sense. > > The task of the thinker, as Lyotard states earlier on in The Differend, is > to (paraphrasing) find the impossible idioms which bear witness to > differends without converting them into litigations. For to do so would > wrong them. But in the diffferned which lies between the deep silence of > the Stein Notice and phrasing itself presents an even more intense problem. > How to make a phrase which bears witness to the terrible silence that it > carries with it and cannot be known? **To bear witness requires and addressee who shares the words/meanings of the addressor, and if common words/phrases do not suffice, new words/phrases must be invented, explained, shared. > > Lyotard, after this turns away from the great book, and to the essay. > "Attempts" in the sense of the verb essayer (to try). Let's recall some > basic things about the phrase, as put in The Differend. It is a sort of atom > consisting of four poles or instances (which I will not repeat for sake of > space). Also, we, I, etc, do not precede the phrase, we are instantiated as > subjects during the absolute now of the phrase's happening, or its "is it > happening?" as Lyotard puts it more properly. **The personification of phrases as actors, entities is troubling, for only humans and other animals experience affects, pains, feelings, intentions. Still, as noted above, language has a priority, and Man awaits the Event. > > It is here that the body comes in for me. In The Phrase-Affect, Lyotard's > tone becomes more visceral, speaking of the instantiation of the phrase > universe as a kind of cutting up of the "is it happening?". Now one of the > necessities of the phrase is that it link. This is what the affect phrase > will not do. Lyotard calls it a suspension of linkages, among other things. > However, and I think this is the most crucial point, the "is it happening?," > which occurs with the presentation of each phrase is itself such a > suspension. That means that invisibly or silently in each phrase, the affect > abides. The link of the affect to regular phrase is through the pole of > sens, meaning or sense, this pole being the most indeterminant of the four. > All an affect gives is a feeling (sentiment), pleasure or pain. But it is a > somewhat unconscious occurence, given that linkages are suspended and the > phrase universe, which would constitute us and the referent, etc, has yet to > happen. **Trying to understand this. Perhaps as one's physical strength limits/bounds physical actions. As for "suspension", noted above, the presumed "happening" may not take place.. > > Here the difference is between a feeling and a meaning. The later can be > verified by means of cognitive procedures, but the former excedes or > precedes all cognition, all subjectivity. **Admitting the problems of linking cause and effect, does an unfelt pain exist? However it is also strangely > constitutive. Where I link onto to this is through a literal reading of the > word "feeling". Our sensations constitute ourselves as ascertained bodies: > my skin as limit, myself in this space, etc. But that constitution occurs > after an affect that we will not know, the sensation in which we happen to > ourselves, as bodies that are yet to be concrete, identifiable bodies. > > Later in "Prescription" (translated in Toward the Postmodern, originally in > Lectures d'enfance) he will write of the body: "Why should this tissue of > motifs, this memento mori be called 'aesthetic'? To be, aesthetically (in > the sense of Kant's First Critique), is to be-there, here and now, exposed > in space-time, and to the space-time of something that touches before any > concept or even any representation. This before is not known, obviously, > because it is there before we are. It is something like birth or infancy > (latin in fans)-- there before we are. The there in question is called the > body... When the law comes to me, with the ego and with language, it is too > late. Things will have already taken a turn. ANd the turn of the law will > not manage to efface this first touch. Aesthetics has to do with this first > touch: the one that touched me when I was not there... The touch is > necessarily a fault with regard to the law. ...And to the extent that it > maintains itself, persists in the mode of this immemorial space-time, this > savagery or this sinful peregrination, it is always there as a potentiality > of the body. If the law must be both announced and obeyed, it must overcome > the resistance of this fault or this sinful potentiality constituted at > birth (by which I mean a pontentiality deriving from the fact that one is > born before being born into the law)." **The law of survival? The rules imposed on small children by body language or with words? > > Ok. This other body, or affect, choose your synonym, stays with us, we feel > it but will not know it. In the Valery piece, Lyotard refers to this "state" > as disorder (via Valery). The suspension of linkages from which the art > object issues, and which an intense piece of art or writing will stir in > its spectator. In any case, these shocks will not work for any system of > programmatic production and it is to that extent that they are a form of > implicit resistance. We should do well, though, not romanticize affect. > Remember that another word for it is the sublime, a suspension in which > pleasure and pain intermingle in a near incomprehensible fashion. > > Why I am centering my work on the body is that in the last moments of > Lyotard's metaphors for affect, his tone becomes more and more sensory, > visceral. If it is not the presence of the body proper that he is reffering > to, it is something that will at least have the magnitude of a body in the > primal sense: open to the range of sensations, there here and now, > vunerable, absolutely so. That is all I can write for now. But for other > body references look into the essay "Mainmise" in The Hyphen, "Can thought > go on without a body?" and "Matter and Time" (both in The Inhuman), the > chapters about agony and the throat in Soundproof Room (which should have > been translated, I think, as "Deafening Chamber"), no. 110 The Differend > and other passages when he speaks of animality or the greek phone. > > Even with as much as I have written here, I still feel it to be reductive. > Sorry about that, there's no way to pin it down quickly.
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