From: gvcarter-AT-purdue.edu
Date: Fri,  5 Nov 2004 11:39:31 -0500
Subject: Re: question... lucasist and the SI - modes of production



Steve,

oh...

g

Quoting steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk:

> Geof
> 
> i always thought Christian Metz was male is she really female ?  in work
> office not home where the libray is...
> 
> love the tarkovski's....
> 
> steve
> >
> > Glen,
> >
> > A good book to read alongside Deleuze's Cinema books is Christian's
> > Metz's  _Language and Cinema_, particularly the latter part where she
> > discusses what  she is doing in relation to functionalist linguist,
> > Louis Hjelmslev.
> >
> > H crops up quite a few times in D&G work, and if one looks at G's
> > efforts in  Chaosmos, one finds H playing an important role there.
> >
> > D's flim books have been on my mind as of late as I've been into the
> > work of  Andrei Tarkovsky, particularly the _The Stalker_, _The
> > Sacrifice_, _My Name is  Ivan_, and _The Mirror_ for some work I have
> > been doing.
> >
> > For a good contemporary and counter-argument to Deleueze's cinema check
> > out  Mark Hansen's _New Philosophy for New Media_ (2004).
> >
> > Okay, that's more info that I needed to give given that you haven't
> > even asked  or turned to these books yet.  (And _D&R_ is quite enough
> > besides! :)
> >
> > best, geof
> >
> >
> > Quoting Glen Fuller <g.fuller-AT-uws.edu.au>:
> >
> >> Steve,
> >>
> >> I don't really deal with gender. That is one of my general scholarly
> >> blindspots that I am working on to improve. In my paper I kind of
> >> gloss  over it. I think it is a very complex issue that requires
> >> someone a lot  smarter than me!!! The (re)production of enthusiasms I
> >> guess could be  aligned according to gender. But I would be wary of
> >> associating  something like the buffy series with a necessarily
> >> non-masculine  enthusiasm. I have actually been thinking about it in
> >> terms of
> >> the ‘pimp’ as the pimp figure has become a constituent part of one of
> >> the dominant tropes within popular culture, especially MTV-ised pop
> >> culture. I have been thinking about the pimp seriously after the rise
> >> to popularity of the ‘Pimp My Ride’ tv show on MTV. I am currently in
> >> Europe so I got watch all the episodes a couple of weekends ago.
> >> Anyway, you are either a facilitator of desire (pimp) or the ‘hoe’
> >> (fan  object – fanject) or the perp who enjoys ‘himself’ (fan). Is the
> >> ‘perp’  and ‘pimp’ necessarily masculine? Is the ‘hoe’ necessarily
> >> feminine? If  desire is unlocked from the oedipal triangle, but then
> >> re-examined in  terms of how it is reconnected within popular culture
> >> formations I am  not sure if gender is the best way to talk about it.
> >> The pressing  problem is more the economic considerations of
> >> enthusiasm and how it is  (re)produced, sustained and exploited if the
> >> economic is understood  (along with desire) as a determinate modality
> >> of enthusiasm. Or  something like that, needs a lot more work.
> >>
> >> More specifically, I am normally only interested in gender, if gender
> >> (understood as the discoursed molar aggregate of power relations
> >> facilitated through distinctions made of biological difference) is one
> >>  of the necessary conditions for a specific event. It then becomes a
> >> question of scale and what happens in an event ('what do bodies do'),
> >> like if there are a group of guys and someone does something, is that
> >> action related to gender? What are the necessary conditions for the
> >> action-event? In my car stuff I talk about technological difference in
> >>  much the same way as gender, as not all actions of participants in a
> >> hyper-masculine culture like car enthusiasm are in a direct relation
> >> to  the incorporeal attributes of anthropomorphic gendering. Why?
> >> Because  technologies also have a 'gender' (derived from Marx's
> >> "nonhuman sex")  that is no way human. This is a controversial
> >> position and expect to  get hammered by feminists, but I think it is
> >> more important to focus on  which differences 'matter' in the
> >> eventuality of action, not how such  actions can be reconciled to
> >> conform to well worn reductive notions of  mimetic relations. In other
> >> words, it is a bit like saying all candy- events are candy-ish because
> >> of the dominant ingredient of sugar. But  all candies are different
> >> from each other because of the minor
> >> ingredients that differenciate the sugarness. For example, in Coke it
> >> is allegedly the 'secret ingredient' that defines Coke by its
> >> Cokeness.  I think work on the big stuff (like gender or sugar) needs
> >> to be  complimented by the 'little stuff' (which is why it is a
> >> question of  scale). However, in enthusiast car cultures the role of
> >> the car is not  exactly 'little'!!!
> >>
> >> Is it even possible to talk about ‘truth-value’ anymore though? I
> >> think  this discussion has happened a number of times on this list! I
> >> have  been reading some stuff that begins teasing out the
> >> ramifications of  D&G’s conception of simulacra. There is a
> >> particularly good paper by  Nathan Widder [(2004). "Foucault and Power
> >> Revisited." European Journal  of Political Theory 3(4): 411-432.
> >> online version here if not a member  of sage journal databases:
> >> http://www.psa.ac.uk/cps/2003/nathan% 20widder.pdf ] that does some
> >> good work talking about post-identity  politics from a Deleuzian
> >> rereading of Foucault. Anyway, in a similar  way, I would ask if we
> >> should rather be talking about 'post-truth  politics'? If you take the
> >> Badiou/Lacan/Zizek-event (here is Zizek on  the event, which is close
> >> enough):
> >>
> >> “The Event is the impossible Real of the structure, of its synchronous
> >>  symbolic order, the engendering violent gesture which brings about
> >> the  legal Order that renders this very gesture retroactively
> >> ‘illegal’,  relegating it to the spectral repressed status of
> >> something that can  never by fully acknowledged-symbolised-confessed.
> >> In short, the  synchronous structural Order is a kind of
> >> defence-formation against its  grounding event which can be discerned
> >> only in the guise of a mythical  spectral narrative.” from The Fragile
> >> Absolute, or, Why is the
> >> Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?, p.92.
> >>
> >> Then Truth is still possible in some Real sense. However, if the
> >> actualisation of the virtual only ever produces a low-level simulacra
> >> (from Massumi on the molar aggregate of the ‘person’):
> >>
> >> “Since no particular body can entirely coincide with the code
> >> (regularized functions) enveloped in its assigned category and in the
> >> various images recapitulating it, a molar person is always a bad copy
> >> of its model – an unacknowledged, low-level becoming; an undercover
> >> simulation.” User’s Guide, p. 181, fn 12.
> >>
> >> Then we end up with Guattari’s politico-aesthetic paradigm, which
> >> would  contradict the SI/Spectacle perspective. Maybe the ‘labour of
> >> truth’ is  a better way to talk about the different levels of
> >> discursive practice  (linguistic and extra-linguistic) that facilitate
> >> the becoming of an  event’s modality (passage from the virtual to the
> >> actual). A key  example I will probably be using in the politicized
> >> version of the  sequels paper is Powell’s ‘case’ for war put forward
> >> at the UN. In  other words, I am much more interested in the
> >> production of truth by  way of the cinematic (spectacle) than the
> >> truth value of the spectacle.  Maybe, in this way, you could align the
> >> pessimism of the SI take on the  Spectacle with Baudrillard’s take on
> >> simulacra. I have yet to read  Deleuze’s cinema books so maybe they
> >> can offer something?? But first I  need to read logic of sense (after
> >> I finish D&R!!)…
> >>
> >> Ciao,
> >> Glen.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> > glen
> >> >
> >> > i was interested in  your paper - (you'll have to email me a copy,
> >> please).
> >> >
> >> > Is it necessary for the 'fan' to be masculine in your  theory? in
> >> other
> >> > words in the mode of production where does the woman enter into the
> >> > structure.  I was thinking  especially of the attack on the
> >> blockbuster by
> >> > such movies as 'Hero'  and of course the Buffy and  Chicklet
> >> phenomenas.
> >> >
> >> > What made me think of 'value'  was the existence of those media
> >> events such
> >> > as the documentary series 'The Power of Nightmares'  which uniquely
> >> deserves
> >> > the status of being a truth-event given the way in which it
> >> > describes
> >> the
> >> > history of the neo-cons, the islamists  and third-way neoliberals
> >> > relationsionships to power and their use of fear. The Debord/SI
> >> > point
> >> is
> >> > that they believed that all media events/images were absolutely
> >> equivilant
> >> > in that there is no truth in the spectacle.  It occurred to me that
> >> > a media/event such as the Power of Darkness  considered as a
> >> > truth-event denying the absoluteness of the SI perspective - truth
> >> > is an
> >> interesting
> >> > problem...
> >> >
> >> > steve
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> >>
> >> --
> >> PhD Candidate, Centre for Cultural Research
> >> University of Western Sydney
> >>
> >>
> 
> 
> 
>