Date: Sun, 15 Sep 1996 16:10:15 -0400
Subject: d-3-->d-1...2
[DDD perpetuates a promenade of pirouettes...Hi Everyone! ;] ]
David and I had a good phone-chat last night [hi, David], and I think we actually managed to figure a few things out...managed not, of course, to "under/stand" each other but to, for a sec, get to a spot in which we didn't appear to be speaking at cross-purposes. We talked about negation, exclusion, differends, self-interest (motivation), etc. (You shoulda been there. ;] ) So now that we've practiced talking with each other, let's try it again.
I've asked David on the list what he finds disturbing about Derrida's third position, and he has answered as a Lacanian...that is, David has offered a reading of Derrida ACROSS Lacan's rules of cognition. Fair enough. But because I'm assuming that Lacan's rules of cognition are precisely among those that Derrida's work calls into question, I have a problem with holding him (derrida) responsible for those (lacan's) rules.
This is not to say that such a reading-across shouldn't be done or that we could/should stop doing it. Not at all. But it does seem necessary, Marshall, does it not?, to at least attempt to attend to the differends we create.[?] It seems important, at least, to be willing to play the hyper-hermeneut...to switch codes and then hit the text again, and again, and again, with other rules of cognition, other criteria for interpretation and judgment. And since it is D-1 and not D-3 in the hot seat (convenient, eh?), I will re-direct a question to David.
In Derrida's explication of the distinction between Hegel's "lordship" and Bataille's "sovereignty," he notes that one accedes to lordship when one manages to put life into service of meaning-making, when one manages to make life work for the "constitution of self-consciousness." One becomes a master by risking one's own life in the negation of another's life: the master becomes master by denying the slave. So lordship makes the negative work in the service of the positive, the no/thing work in the service of the some thing. "[T]his economy of life," D says "restricts itself to conservation, to circulation and self-reproduction as the reproduction of meaning" (Writing and Difference 255-56).
But sovereignty is not lordship--he says it's "totally other. Bataille puts it outside dialectics. He withdraws it from the horizon of meaning and knowledge." Sovereignty does not fight with the negative but simply refuses to take the negative seriously... in it's face, it offers a burst of non-reactionary laughter. This "point of non-reserve, is neither positive nor negative" and "exceeds the possibility of meaning." The word laughter itself, D says "must be read in a burst, as a nucleus of meaning bursts in the direction of the system of the sovereign operation ("drunkenness, erotic effusion, sacrificial effusion, poetic effusion, heroic behavior, anger, absurdity," etc.) (256). The difference between lordship and sovereignty does not simply *make sense*. Rather, D says, "it is the difference *of sense*, the unique interval which separates meaning from a certain non-meaning."
Derrida, then--who has been reading Bataille--locates sovereignty as a non-positive affirmation within a general economy; he locates lordship as a positivity within a restricted economy.
_____So, DAVID, d-1 (but really d-2...David Deeeeewaaaaaaayne--I'm in trouble now....), here's my first question: Will you, por favor, read Lacan (any part of his work...but especially that point at which you believe Lacan negates negation and/or "slips out of the negative") across this distinction between lordship and sovereignty and locate Lacan/his work within what Derrida/Bataille/Hegel would call either a "restricted" or a "general" economy?
_____Second question. Can you comment, not as a Lacanian but as David, the scholar of Lacan, on what you take to be the differences between Derrida and Lacan's beginning assumptions and the rules of cognition they develop *from* those beginning assumptions?
If these questions have been asked in a way that doesn't work for you, of course, please feel free to reread/redefine/rewrite them in whatever manner you choose to make them do 'it' for you.
Thanks in advance,
ddd
From: sophist@UTARLG.UTA.EDU
Date: Sun, 15 Sep 1996 22:30:33 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: vjv>dm: new branch
David, I want to start what might seem to be a new branch in the discussion ... but not (by any means) to leave behind the discussion on economics that we have been pursuing since the beginning.
At the end of Ch. 1, you wind down your discussion of Aristotle clearing away a "space for rhetoric" and you attempt to rewind, for the next chapter, your discussion of "Lacan provid[ing] us with its place." And in further winding down, you refer to A's and L's work as possibly being "use[d] in the promotion of rhetorical and interdisciplinary work in the academy, since no matter what degree of insight might be attributed to their formalizations of rhetoric, Aristotle's and Lacan's work on rhetoric--it must be admitted [!!]--is an example of what might be termed, _interdisciplinary study_."
_____What do you mean "interdisciplinary study"? And "it must be admitted"!! This statement comes as and continues to be a surprising statement all the way to the end of the book. Later you have some denegrating remarks to make about Rhetoric as a discipline. (Which I completely have sympathy for and would join in by pushing Rhetorics beyond recognition altogether.) _____Hence my puzzlement, befuddlement, when reading that rhetoric might be "interdis...." Why denegrate a piss-ant and raise up a slave owner? (Of course, you may want to adjust my comic characterizations to suit your own interests!)
Moreover, what puzzles me is your occasional statements such as Aristotle and Lacan and their "work" are "two of [rhetoric's] greatest theorists." So I have to ask, _____What is your theory or notion of value? _____And what do you mean by "theory"?
Where am I coming from in this 2nd question, part two, concerning theory? Paul deMan had arrived at precisely the same conclusions about discourse and rhetoric as you have, and yet he "resists theory." For him, theory is the attempt to totalize, to wrap up in some privileged sort of way the Real (Das Ding, etc.). And it, as you say yourself, can't be done. It's impossible! And I would say, even if it could be done, it would be necessary to resist it all the way!! So ... my question concerning value/theory!
If Aristotle and Lacan are our greatest theorists, then, I would find, ever find, it necessary to resist and disrupt them every step along the way! Such would be the response to thinking them the greates theorists. I can't imagine that they themselves would think of their work in that fashion, unless it would be for a hoot!
(Parenthetically, let me say that your characterization of Geo. Kennedy is but started chronologically and then dropped. It is only a 1/4 truth you present of Geo. Have you continued to read his work? beyond where you stopped, which was very early in his career. What about ... to make a very long story short ... his article "A Hoot in the Dark" [in P&R], in which rhetoric is in all things organic and inorganic and comes exceptionally close to being called Will? What kind of notion of Value would we have to have to read Geo.'s developing rhetoric and what kind of [para]theory would we need to account for this change, which is, in his 'thinking'?)
Yours in the involution,
victor
From: pretext@onramp.net
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 1996 00:07:49 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: a tired olde deMan to ZeeChic: a question
Dear Professor ZeeChic,
thank God for your column in the JOUR-NIL for PCS. I read it every
mourning! I have been putting a question to my friends who keep putting a
question to my question and we never get anywhere. So I will put this
question to you. Professor (of great POW-er), Why is it that I, a pereson
who is free to enjoy life, why is it that I engage in systematic pursuits
of terrible unhappinesses, methodically organizing my failures, etc.?
What's in it for me? What perverse libidinal profit? (Forgive the
eco-gnomic question, but I cannot resist this last bit of ... oh,
perversity. This is my cynical question. If you answer it satisfying
yourself, then, I will ask my ironic one, and then my humorous/kynical one
that you will never understand!)
Dear Forked-up Person,
What a disgusting letter!! I think that we should
recall here Lacan's reversal of Dostoyevski's famous proposition from _The
Brothers Karamazov_. "If God doesn't exist, then nothing at all is
permitted any longer." In other words, you stupid smuck, you need the
Negative! Is not the ultimate proof of the pertinence of this reversal the
shift from the Law as Prohibition to the rule of 'norms' or 'ideals' we
are witnessing here on this list, in our 'permissive' talk and beyond in
our societies: in all domains of our everyday lives, from eating habits
to sexual behavior and professional success, there are fewer and fewer
prohibitions, yet more and more guilt ... Yes, GUILT!! And it's all
Nietzsche's fault. Heidegger was right!! Nietzsche made him become a
NaughtZi! more and more guilt! when the subject's performance is found
lacking with respect to the norm or ideal. Where is my armor ... I mean
armour!! This enigma is the proper theme of psychoanalysis: how is it that
the very lack of explicit prohibitions burderns the subject with an often
unbearable liteness of guilt? How is it that the very injunction to be
happy and just to enjoy yourself can turn into a ... what shall I call it?
... a ... yes ... a ferocious superego monster? Please don't write anymore
followup lettres! Take a couple of tylenol and watch some Hitchcock films,
but not Bryan Singer's film _The Usual Suspects_ and do not read what I
have writen about it in response to another person's letter because I have
watched the film again and I missed the point. How could this have
happened? If I had only read Melville's _The Confidence Man_ prior to
viewing Singer's film, I would never have written such silly stuff. I
mean, What are your thoughts about this film? But have you read Melville?
In any case, just don't bother me again.
From: Greg Ulmer
Hello reinview
My question is:
this question may be off the point a bit, sense it asks about
speculation beyond this book. That sort of going beyond the book was
what interested me in my reinview (using this book as a point of
departure for further thought with the reivewers).
best
From: Marshall Alcorn
Let me try to keep focus on our general discussion while at the same time
respond to some questions asked by Victor, David, and Diane.
It may help to respond to Victor first: Victor, I generally agree with
most of your disagreements. As I see it we are neither disagreeing, nor
speaking at cross purposes, but rather speaking from different resting
places in the same dialectic. Yes, in ideal conditions, we do sometimes
both learn and change by talking.
But we do have some solid disagreements. Perhaps the most minor is the
most significant. Hey-- (I say in offended protest)--- I like the
Schniederman and Clement books on Lacan. But I can see your point of
view, I think. I too, like you, can be suspicious of any excessive
idealization of any and all masters. To paraphrase one of my students:
"Whenever you get seduced, you usually get fucked up as well." Lacan was
a smart guy, but he was also I think a seducer and fucker upper of other
people. All that stuff about taking notes, etc, what a jerk.
At the same time, though, as if in compensation for his sins, Lacan
believed that therapy could be something other than seducing and fucking
people up. His theory of the four discourses claims that analysis should
be a discourse different in kind from the discourse of any master. The
discourse of the master is the discourse of whatever person or god terms
you get connected to by the accidents of your imaginary identifications.
We all are connected to masters and fighting them as well.
Psychoanalysis, though, as a process, is not a discourse of a master.
Psychoanalysis does not ask you to believe anything, or do anything. It
stimulates a certain style of reflecting on signifiers. Your "cure" is
in your personal freedom to make connections that make sense to you.
Now I can get to what seems the more substantial argument about
negation. I am still not sure we are all talking about the same thing here.
What, Victor, do you think that Zizek is asking you to do when he makes
his argument about negation? I can imagine having a number of different
disagreements with him here, but I would like to get more clear about
your own suspicions.
I think Zizek is in part repeating a commonplace psychoanalytic
generalization about owning loss.
As scholars, we might connect Zizek's idea about negation to various
general claims of knowledge about how language in general operates,
(produce differends Diane?). And Zizek's own background as a philosopher
prods us to do this, and we do need, I think, to worry through what he
suggests here. There are clearly important general claims about
structure. But I do not believe that this means that this claim about
negation works the way we have been describing it, as if it were
something we could easily, choose to do or not do. The key words, for
me, are about working through fantasy.
Negation is not an action as we commonly understand the term action.
Negation relates to a psychic process. No one can decide by will or
effort to negate, just as no one can decide by will to work through the
fantasy and then in that action of will be done with it. "No connection
except by the negative," describes a certain process whereby we have to
undo the fantasies that operate in our relating to others. Fantasy
obscures our relations to others. It misrespresents others in the terms
of fantasy. To "work through" fantasy, we need to accept the lack, here
meant the lack of connection within ourselves, that the fantasy disguises
in our relation to the other.
Zizek's argument about fantasy: there is
no relationship, no love relationship, no
social/political relationship, etc., no connection ... except by the
Negative (the function of loss) and that we might best serve ourselves and
others (now, here comes the pedagogical statement!) if we "go through [take
ourselves and our readers through] the fantasy."
means, I think, (David might rework this a bit) that we must in some
manner work through the characteristic lack of connection to the other
held in place by a characteristic fantasy. (A more Lacanian explanation
of all this would stress fantasy, the imaginary and the big Other of the
symbolic)
But what does this mean, to work through fantasy? I think it is
difficult both to say and difficult to do. But it is something that
follows a certain rule that Lacan and Zizek have tried to formulate and
communicate as a negation. If your are not a therapist, this particular
verbal formulation is not likely to mean much. On the other hand,
Victor, I think that in the first part of your response, where you
yourself idealize an ability to respond to others, to change yourself
because of the discourse of others, you demonstrate your own commitment
to this principle of seeking the other beyond the fear and fantasy that
obscures him or her. Maybe, of course, this is all bullshit. Maybe
everything is fantasy. We never "work through" them we just change them
and change ourselves through them. But I personally do not accept this
version. This is the best I can do here to account for my self
interest in Lacan. There are probably other ways to account for purging
of fantasy and this valorization of a response that is more just in
relation to the other, but this is what Lacan came up with.
And finally I can respond to David:
And yet all this needs to be situated within the parameters of some
larger paradox that makes it all both true and not true. I do like good
beer. I am glad I did not spend all my life as a welder in Dallas. I
can't entirely give up a certain pragmatic understanding of
self-interest.
Enough for me, I have freshmen to teach tomorrow.
Marshall Alcorn
From: "DAVID D. METZGER"
The other night Diane and I talked for about three hours. I told her
that I would develop my responses to her questions for the
reinterview.
David asks D3(D1 + D2):
___________O.K. Are you asking me the following: Does your criticism
of what you call Derrida's "metaphortonymy" carry over into other
"third-position rhetorics," such as Lyotard's? Do you, in fact,
reject Hartman's formulation of Lyotard's project? In *The Lost
Cause,* do you reject the possibility or necessity for "a
post-Holocaust aesthetics"?
D1 + D2 (She is legion) says, "You bet!"
So, I say: I would agree with Lyotard that "What is at stake in a literature, in
a philosophy, in a politics perhaps, is to bear witness to differends
by finding idioms for them."
I would add, here, for the reinterview:
The next question for me is, "How do we work at the level of the `to
bear witness,' since `history' and `subjectivity' bore witness to the
Holocaust?" From this position, I would "phrase" one of many projects
for post-Holocaust aesthetics: sheer history away from imitation,
sheer subjectivity away from irony. Why? . . .because pre-holocaust
aesthetics can provide imitation (the Nuremberg Trials), irony
(Hogan's Heroes), and ironic-being (Catch-22).
On the one hand, *imitation* shows us how a criminal might live with himself or herself; it is the particular brand
of special pleading that is often confused with "subjectivity" itself:
to be a subject means to be biased. Irony, on the other hand, shows us how criminals
might live with themselves until they can't. Irony introduces an
ultimate term into vagaries of association that constitute an
individual perspective. Even within a world of fantasy, even within a
world of pure subjectivity, irony offers a glimpse of something else,
something that an individual subjectivity cannot account for. *
What is more, this "something else" has been often identified with an
individual's imitation of his/her own death in life (Plato's
*Gorgias,* for example) or with an ironic subject's secret place of
enjoyment (Augustine's *Confessions,* for example). With the
following result: both imitation and irony (now, a third position,
"ironic being") are identified as positions of truth (understood,
here, as "knowing what something truly is when it isn't).
Now, having said all that, is it possible for a pre-Holocaust
aesthetics to render the horror of the Holocaust using precisely these
devices? . . .which has led me to consider in subsequent work,
*Pre/Post-Holocaust aesthetics---the differend?* "Freud's Jewish
Science and Lacan's Sinthome," "The Totalitarian Good in Snodgrass'
Fuhrer Bunker," and the subject of my second book, *Psychoanalysis and
The Theology of Discourse.*
_____So, why say that what you're doing is interdisciplinary?
Interdisciplinary. What an awful word! I just haven't found another
word that suits or redresses me as well. I didn't want to say that I
theorize, precisely because I do think (as Victor points out) that
theorizing *totalizes* phrases by constructing/developing/linking
rules without letting us know to what we've been asked to bear
witness. And that's the other problem with theorizing; it constructs
a we; it asks "we" to bear witness. Enter *let'(US)s be reasonable
about this.* *Enter cumin saints.* Enter logos understood as *the
discourse.* Push and/or Pull to Open. What's wrong with that?
Opening seems a lot like closing when the "we" hides how some/bodies
must bear the burden of its exi(s)t-ence.
Now, this doesn't mean that I can do without theory, understood here
as *how to construct an Other using the most advanced European
technologies.* I am interested in theorists and theories, and I even
like to treat movies, mathematics, and PEZ dispensers as theories. In
*The Lost Cause* I wanted to chart the disappearance and appearance of
the Other-Theory. And I tried to write *The Lost Cause* in a manner
that would allow a structure of the God-blip, identity-blip, and
code-switch to appear if there is a structure to these God-blips,
identity-blips, and code-switchings that are left in the Other's
(a)wake. Are these God-blips, identity blips, and code-switchings a
projection of something-else? Of/to what might these God-blips,
identity-blips, and code-switchings bear witness? Behind all of these
questions is the assumption that communication or
not-speaking-at-cross-purposes bears witness to the Other. At the
time I wrote *The Lost Cause* I guess I was just-as/more interested in
what miscommunication and speaking-at-cross-purposes bears witness to.
Enter psychoanalysis. Enter Lacan. Enter the Real.
From: TheVoidBoy@AOL.COM
___________I wonder if the tie between mysticism and the number 3 (as excess,
as infinityhas been explored explicitly by you ( and others) in the full
force of religious dogmatics? It seems "obvious" to me that a connection is
being forged, or has been forged, and will have been forged, between the
One-Which-Is-Three (Eternal, All-consuming, Complete), i.e., the Trinity, and
all this talk about excess and the infinite.
___________Therefore, is there, in "fact", a metaphysics (theologicks) at
work behind all these economies? Any "good" THEologian would tell you that
to negate the negative is simply to find GAWD.
From: Judy Williamson
Sorry to be such a bore, but I really can't handle another post from this
list. I know it's a tecno-faux pas to write this to the list, but PLEASE
remove my name from all the pretense stuff. Guess I'm just a regular
pedestrian.
Thank you very much,
Judy Williamson
PS I may still use Vic Vit's new Cyber-Reader next semester w/ my
classes despite this list! It's a darn fine reader even if this list is
not my cup of tea.
From: sophist@UTARLG.UTA.EDU
Hey, VoidBoy, VVelcome back. It's been over a year since we talked here
together.
About your question concerning mysticism and the negative and the three,
I in my posts am not alluding at all to any of these. You are very right
to point to pure negation as being equated with God (pure Being, etc.).
KBurke makes much of this point a number of places, especially in _GM_.
Marshall, I will get back to your excellent question in a while. I am a
bit under the weather right now, and your question does require a careful
response.
Great discussion here.
Victor
From: Diane Davis
GO(O)D GEAAAAAAAAAAWD!
Hi, Voidboy. Your question made me think about the phenomenon of
languaging through 'the looking glass,' so to speak. History repeats
itself, all right, Marx suggests, but as farce... Infinity, mysticism,
threes...these signify something(s) in a foundational "world" that they
can't signify post-legtimation-crisis. If gawd is dead, infinity,
mysticism, and the trinity lose the capacity to signify anything for
us...and then...poof...they re/turn, farcically, to signify excessively,
again.
"Infinity" re/enters as *a function* of finitude (and not as its
'opposite'); "mysticism" re/enters as a straining to hear what
linguistic structures make unhearable (and not a straining to hear The
Truth); and a notion of "threes" re/enters as the excluded middle/muddle
(and not as synthesis [Hegel] or the one-which-is-three).
What these terms can signify for us is dependent upon whether or not we
believe that "God is in His heaven." And what I hear in your question is
that you're not convinced that I'm convinced that gawd is dead. In the
face of that suspicion, I feel kinda like I do when I say "groovy" and
my students (who are too young to remember Marcia Brady) don't
understand that I am but more so *am not* using it 'straight.' That is,
they don't hear it as a farcical reappropriation. They begin to squirm
uncomfortably, all embarrassed for me, the 60s reject. And RIGHTLY SO.
B/c there's no way to address that mis/communication...no amount of
explaining will get me outta that one. |:/
Bataille makes something of this situation in Simulacra and
Simulation--he says if you hold up a bank with a toy gun as a joke, your
"network of artificial signs will become inextricably mixed up with real
elements"--the clerk behind the counter will REALLY have a heart attack
and die; the police officer will REALLY shoot you in the head; etc.
Reappropriating terms like these--threes, infinity,
mysticism--inevitably invites the charge of foundational signification.
It's an interesting problem...and in the face of it, lemme just say:
Groovy.
ddd
From: ENGROSEN@acs.eku.edu
Hi Vic and David:
This is, like always, drafting at the email prompt, so forgive the
sloppiness....
Sorry its taking me so long to get back on Poincare and the number 3;
flu and teaching.
My interest is generated by this discussion because of my own interest
in the geometricality of rhetoric, and an epistemocritique of the same.
I've written briefly on the geometric relations implied by the four
master tropes as those tropes become figured in such disparate arenas as
renaissance contrapuntal invention tactics, freud's modeling of
dreamwork and of subject systems generally (more laPlanche than
Lacan--but we know from folk like Hayden White and D"Angelo how
sensitive Lacan was to this issue...).
And I'm especially interested in the foundational critique of the
social origins of geometry and its implications not only for physics
(poincare, prigogine) but for philosophy and psychology as well
(Bergson, M-Ponty, Deleuze, Varela etc....)
Thus the reference to Poincare's 3 body problem because that's the place
where an INTRINSIC critique of the geometric suppositions of the
reversible perspective in physics exemplified by calculus and the
stability proofs for planetary orbits by such ideologues as Lagrange and
Laplace.
So I mentioned the 3 body problem as a way to get at, not an invokation
of mysticism as one possible directional thread that someone (i forget)
mentioned, but as a way to critique the ways in which we are committed
to the epistemological and ideologically embedded presuppositions
implied by modeling physical (and rhetorical) processes by recourse to
geometry.
Just as there is a limit to a reading of Ezra Pound by the likes of Hugh
Kenner, who follows Pound's method of reading for interpreting Pound's
"corpus," my sense of things after reading quickly through the chapter
and following this discussion is that reading lacan reading
plato/aristotle/ as a way to get at both techne and epistemic rhetoric
creates a similar set of blind spots.
I'm teaching a course right now at the masters level on "The Idea of
Contingency in 20thC Literature, Philosophy and the Arts 1900-1990"
http://157.89.34.144/eng/ROSENBER/eng545.htm
so by way of apology for my hobby horses poincare, bergson and duchamp
(and, as victor knows, Deleuze).
Poincare set the grounds (hey what a laugh!) for dynamical chaos when he
demonstrated that Newton's proofs for the stability of the solar system
were far from that: by looking at earth's interaction with both the sun
and jupiter, which, for Newton, involved 9 simultaneous linear differential
equations (a reflection of the *complexity* of the interacting forces
involving gravitation inertia etc etc...).
The problem emerges when the global/general solution to these nine
equations ended up converging into a solution as an infinite series and
thus irreducible.
In other words, he could not find a compelling mathematical reason
why the earth, sun and jupiter shouldn't just collide or just spin off
(swerve, to use a Lucretius term popular now) at any moment.....
Out of the recognition of this inherent instability, comes the concept
"sensititve dependence on initial conditions", which those familiar with
- -Jurassic Park_ remember as "the butterfly effect."
Remember it was Laplace's commitment to the calculus of Leibniz and
Newton that led him to argue that the trajectories of ultimately everything,
even living systems could be predicted. here's Poincare on this from
_Science and Method_
If we knew exactly the laws of nature and the situation of the universe
at the initial moment, we could predict exactly the situation of that
same universe at a succeeding moment. But even if it were the case that
the natural laws had no longer an secret for us, we could still only
know the initial situation _approximately_ . If that enabled us to
predict the succeeding istuation with _the same approximation_, that is
all we require, and we should say that the phenomenon has been
predicted, that it is governed by laws. But it is not always so; it may
happen that _small differences in the initial conditions produce very
great ones in the final phenomena_ (earth swerves into the sun; jupiter
decides to take a long vacation).
Physicists would say "in any region of phase space, trajectories exist
which pass through the region infinitely often."
Deleuze's Nietzsche would call that "the eternal return of difference".
For a take on this issue in terms of complexity and rhetoric with
reference to icons in a mac user interface--phase space, aleatory signs,
unstable trajectories, bifurcations, self-organization--
all a very different way of thinking about rhetoric than an assumptions
of the reducibility of physical/rhetorical phenomena to geometric form,
you might check out a very tentative piece that Jimmie Killingsworth and
I did for ieee transactions last dec.
I hope this opens up the territory of the text for more a more direct
critique of its "grounds".
best wishes.....mer
From: ENGROSEN@acs.eku.edu
Hi: one more thing:
the language of poincare and bergson figures prominently in duchamp btw.
For example, the term "ready-made" is highlighted by the author in
Poincare's ch on "Mathematical Invention" in _Science and Method_, and
liberated thought as a form of illumination is described as a kind of
gas obeying the laws of entropy (as in etant donnes 1. the waterfall 2.
the illuminating gas...)
mer
From: levy@onramp.net (Matthew Levy)
hello to david and the pre/text horde!
i would like to delurk here with an open-ended question that in some way
may represent the flip-side to the discussion about self-interest.
_____Is there anything you would like to say here about pedagogy? Has your
recent work on the relationships between philosophies, rhetorics and
geometries affected your thought about or practice in teaching? What does
Lacan have to say to you--or lead you to say to us--about the
teacher/student relation?
thanks! mal
From: "DAVID D. METZGER"
I've been brooding--not thinking, mind you--about the subject of
writing(as)technology for the past six months. So, I can only offer
up a list of *themes* in response to your question.
Theme One: *Writing* emerges out of the question, *Where does a *we*
come from?* When people are reminded that writing is a technology,
they begin to wonder how *we* are. I don't mean to use *we* to
indicate a select group--rather, the very possibility of any group.
Socrates expresses something of this fear in the *Gorgias* when he
complains that sometimes he feels as if he were a doctor defending
himself against a confectioner before a jury of children. And, in the
*Phaedrus*, writing puts into question the position of love as a
method (hodos) for creating human subjects (*yourselves*) who know who
they are. In writing, the *you*, the Platonic subject par excellence,
is reoriented as an *I* or as a *herself/himself* or as a logically
derivable rhetorical affect, since writers can only be ignorant of
readers.
Theme Two: Printing reminded people that writing is a technology,
which reminds people that writing avoids the *you*, so they
substantify the *you* of writing in order not to be reminded that
writing emerges out of the question, *where does a *we* come from?*
Ong uses a phenemenological model to explain the possibility of a
"print consciousness" or the change in the history of consciousness
effected by printing. And, although I've never been comfortable with
phenomenological models of writing (as I show in chapters 2 and 3 of
*The Lost Cause*), Ong's choice of a phenemenological model and its
apparent descriptive power are interesting to note: Ong shows how an
I is a you. So, writers can love, hate, and be ignorant of readers.
For this reason, writing can incite dialectic as Ramus argued;
writing, after the invention of printing, can be a method as Plato
used the term, a way to create human subjects (you's). Look at the
number of prologues, proems, "My Dearest Gentle Dove-Shaped Reader"
notes, and prefaces written at that time. Courtly love failed as as
guarantee of difference in the late Middle Ages, so it becomes a
guarantee of sameness (I = you) in Renaissance rhetorical theory and
poetics (same thing, really): *Loving in truth, and fain in verse my
love to show,/ That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my
pain,/ Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,/
knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain.*
Theme Three: ANA (a new apparatus) reminds people that writing is a
technology, which reminds people that writing avoids the *you*, so
they substantify the *you* of writing in order not to be reminded that
writing emerges out of the question, *where does a *we* come from?*
I will, for my own convenience, use net-worked documents as an example
of ANA. It seems to me that when I read a hyper-text document, the
*you,* is substantified by the disappearance of the *I.* In this
particular circumstance, dialectic, that is Platonic dialectic
reconceived in Renaissance terms, is no longer able to bear the
hermeneutical burden of *social/identity* because there is no I/writer
who knows some you/reader. There is a you/reader who is a you/writer.
Of course, I may be trying to delineate in rhetorical terms what may,
in fact, be pragmatic. ANA may put into question distinctions between
rhetoric and pragmatics. The conceptual conditions of a text
(rhetoric) are the material conditions (pragmatics) for the *you* who
pops $1 into *BloodSurge* at the arcade--choosing which tunnels to run
down, choosing in what order to pop off the vampires. Or imagine one
of Plato's lovers surfing the net for nonsubjects (beloveds) who need
to learn that they are Zeus-like, Mars-like, or whatever: ML34 seeks
ML8-12; no ZL's, HL's, PL's need apply. Unfortunately, the beloved
does not know he is *Mars-like,* so how could he answer? And if the
lover-beloved chain is broken, how could some lover even know that he
is, in fact, Mars-like? He couldn't. So, ANA leaves us with *you's,*
a community of *you's.*
I know this response is getting rather long, and I've only mentioned
*method* once. So, let me sketch out the methodological needs of this
community of *you's*: 1)Methods help one invent, not discover, a
social identity; 2)Methods do not explain, since there is an Other
(beloved) and it is us; 3)Methods do not relate material and
conceptual conditions, they orient us according to where/when, since
where/when become the principal terms of perception (rather than
matter and idea).
So, what about rhetoric and geometry? I'll have to leave that for
another day. But since I think that a community of *you's* is
precisely what Kant had in mind, I suspect *yo'all* can anticipate my
answer. There's also a whole other angle to this question that
requires a historicization of *the page* from the book/prophecy agon
of the TANAK to Buckminister Fuller (that is, I think a geodesic dome
is an unfolding of *the page*). In those terms, I think ANA teaches
us how to unfold, rather than fold, a page. Methods, then, would be an
unfolding, rather than a folding, of the page.
Fascinating Stuff. We must talk more about this, David
I must say -- I agree with Judy
please remove my name from the pretense stuff as well
PLEASE remove my name from all the pretense stuff.
From: Diane Davis
Hey David and everyone.
Interesting post, David, about how you would characterize what Lyotard's
doing. I'm not sure I follow all of what you were getting at, but I
really like Hogan's Heroes >:> And I'm nodding with you-cum-Lyotard in
a big way that we ought to be about bearing witness to differends and
finding idioms for them.
So, a redirect. You read Derrida across Lacan in The Lost Cause. IMHO,
you offer an interesting and vigorous read of Derrida that I found
fascinating. But, again, I'm still suggesting that this read has
silenced an important part of what Derrida's up to...b/c his work calls
into question the very rules of cognition you've judged him by. That, in
itself, is not a problem for me at all. But *stopping there* seems a bit
of a problem. What I asked you to do in my last post to you was to flip
it, to read Lacan across Derrida to see what you come up with. But I
realize that this is a majorly busy time...the semester's in full swing.
So it may be unfair of me to ask such a time-consuming thang of you
right now. (I know *I* would balk and/or squawk if it landed on my
doorstep.)
And/but I'm still really interested in this question. So lemme open it
up s'mo.
_____Would anyone care to offer a read of Lacan across Derrida?
Specifically, (the royal-)we are interested in Derrida's third position,
his search for third terms and for ways out of the negative. Would
anyone care to start with Derrida on this idea and give a read of what
Lacan's up to across it?
Feel free to pelt me with spit wads if this is just not what we should
be talking about here. And please don't direct this huge, difficult, and
majorly annoying question back to ME. I'll squawk, I swear... ;]
ddd
David,
_____How much is your book on Aristotle and Lacan (especially the latter)
indebted to Zizek's description of Lacan?
_____If not similar, where are and in what ways are your takeS on Lacan
different?
_____Do you have any sympathy (identify with) Zizek's reading of
"Lacanian theory [as] perhaps the most radical contemporary version of
the Enlightenment"? (_Sublime Object_ 7)
_____If so or not, then, why and how?
Marshall et al., if you have anything to say in relation to these
questions, please jump in.
victor
Marshall, thanks for your long, well-thought out response to me. Your post
was received last Monday (Sept. 16th); at that time I sent a reply saying
that I would get back to you because of being under the weather. I am still
in the storm, and from there I respond.
I don't have any disagreements with you, only necessary differences:
Desiring to say what is not getting said here. Your fantasy is not my
fantasy .)>=
**psychoanalysis as a process**
I do understand your saying that "Psychoanalysis, [...], as a process, is
not a discourse of a master." I have no _reason_ to believe that Lacan
thought otherwise. (And this, my statement, is not to be taken as a ...
'nice' one ... about Lacan.) But I have no reason--notice the emphasis on
'reason'--to believe the proposition that psychoanalysis ... as a process
... is _not_ for mastery. That's like saying, to my ears, Exon is not in
the business for money. I am well aware of the four discourses, and have
tried to write in them all, very self-consciously and openly stating which
one I was attempting to use, when addressing the audience. (And my attitude
toward audiences is that they are highly over-rated!) The one discourse
that I have found most interesting is that of the hysteric. Which I find
now to be generally conservative in the long run. But I have said more than
enough about that one already. (Later, I will return to talk about ethics
and politics ... the only three things that I am interested in.)
**Reading Lacan (((and his expositors)))**
I have read a lot of Lacan; I don't know Lacan. I have read a lot of
Lacan's expositors, and as a result I have no reason to believe that I know
Lacan. (Now, at this point, you or another can intervene and say, "But Yes,
V, that is the whole point!!" But Yes, I learned that so long ago when I
myself entered the Symbolic. And continue to fall into it everyday of my
life. And I don't need the whole pointless made again.
At this point are you reading me as saying that "I do not like Lacan"? If
so, this is not the case at all.
What I am against are the damn expositors of Lacan. (David, in my
estimation, is *not* an expositor of Lacan!) I can't stand to read one more
extended explanation of KB. I certainly don't mind people writing about
Lacan or KB. I do myself. I don't like the stupid expositions. And I
especially do not have any respect for the research protocol in academia
that expects that such expositions be given. I have no respect at all for
academic dis-curse. (one of those four discourses). And that should be
unclearly clear by now. I do not like disciplines. I do not like
metadisciplines. I sense at times that Lacan does not as well. Therein "we"
cross psycho/paths, but without having to slay each other.
VVell, let's blame it on the absent father! Or should we blame it, more so,
on the absent Real?
Let me give you an example of an expositor, namely Zizek:--When I first
read _Sublime Object_ I was very taken by it. I thought it was brilliant.
Since then, I have read it four more times. I think much less of what Zizek
has to say about Lacan and yet enjoy Z's examples from Hitchcock films and
eastern european political jokes. "But Yes, V, that is the whole point!!"
Ha. Ha.
I like the jokes in MKundera much, much more, and his ability to maintain
the paradox of our situation.
Z's article that David referred to ("Re-visioning, 'Lacanian' Social
Criticism") I think is the statement par excellence of THE MASTER SPEAKING.
I can hear the heals of Z's boots clicking together with every point after
point. Z's talk about (his understanding of) the cynical subject is offered
as a superior One! The cynic thinks he knows, but I (Z!!) know better that
he cannot know what I know about knowing and, more importantly, about
Fanta-sizing. There is always something leftover, some residue, that I can
know that the cynical subject cannot know! about himself. And what is
that?, un/namely, "how cynical distance and full reliance on fantasy are
strictly codependent" (25). Co-dependent!! And therein, perhaps as David
was cryptically alluding to in Z's own words, is "the fundamental gesture
of cynicism [...] denounc[ing] genunine authority" (or what stands for it,
such as the Negative), "as a pose, whose sole effective content is raw
coercion or submission for the sake of some material gain. An ironist, in
contrast, doubts if a cold, calculating utilitarian is really what he
pretends to be" (25). Wow, those who would presume to know! and get so much
knowledge (mileage) from negative knowledge.
I've been there before. (...No truer words written.)
Am I being cryptic enough?
Well, it's not cryptic at all. For it's lying all across the *surface* of
each and every post and then some that are absent yet referred to, etc.
Ha, Oh, how we have been inviting each side
------->to fantasize un/just what we are for the other.<---------
By way of ...
******public posts******
******private posts*****
Are my symptoms impure enough? Is it happening? It's happening! One
parannoyance after another. How do I know? Because I am in the Know. I am
the mad-erator.
Enough said, Now I would really like to be subscribed to the list
*pretext*. Would someone please subscribe me?
confidently yours,
PS: **There is no e-mail relationship!**
(Z will say just this very thing in his next book! How do I know? I Know.)
copyright 1996 Victor J. Vitanza and David Metzger.
All Rights Reserved.
Feel free to link to this page, but do not publish otherwise in part or whole
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being given.
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 1996 10:21:28 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: vjv>d3: hahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!
while y'all are ganging up on David may be the moment for me to pay my
respects to him for being the only person I know of to refer to my
"Handbook for a Theory Hobby" (p 19). since this is not my reinview (I
had my chance) I will not try to defend this suspended project (no matter
that David criticized it for its limitation to the imperative; no matter
that all instruction books use the imperative; no matter that Deleuze
Guattari indicate the foundational role of order words)...
What I respond to in __The Lost Cause...__ is the juxtaposition itself
of geometry and rhetoric. In a way the history of method is the story of
how this analogy won the day, proved its irreducibility (if we allow the
subsequent history of mathematics to be included) at least for the
literate apparatus.
_______does the coming of a new apparatus (the electronic one) with
its multimedia text-graphic-audio simultaneous channels, open up the
rhetoric-geometry (or method-mathematics) relationship to other
practices? In principle any two systems may be juxtaposed, and their
semantic domains will necessarily form an ordered exchange. Such is the
*logic of sense* Deleuze defines.
Greg Ulmer
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 1996 20:51:25 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: negation as repetition
Right now, I can't follow you in that question about Zizek and the Usual
Suspects. I see Zizek as being dismissive of self-interest both in that
section and elsewhere. It goes, for me, back to the principle of the
master again. We serve HIS interests in the principle of our misinvested
identity. And what kind of self-interest can this be? HIS. It is as i
the castrated part of ourselves lives on in him, but truly cut off f rom
ourselves. And even
our desire that escapes him--our very ownmost interested self. What a
joke that is, some pitiful accident of signification that puts us at war
with ourselves where nothing really can be won or lost, except for our
understanding of the signifiers of the battle.
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 1996 12:27:16 EST
Subject: Re: ddd-->dm
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 1996 20:14:10 -0400
Subject: voidboy->ddd et al
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 1996 22:01:03 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: voidboy->get me outta dis void, PLEASE
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 1996 21:26:04 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: vjv: voidboy->ddd et al
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 1996 09:53:00 -0400
Subject: Re: voidboy->ddd et al
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 1996 15:06:50 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: vjv>mer:Duchamp/counting
This is a famous ur text for chaos theory.
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 1996 15:09:16 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: vjv>mer:Duchamp/counting
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 1996 13:12:08 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: pedagogy and rhet/comp/geom/lacan-discipleship
Date: Fri, 20 Sep 1996 13:41:53 EST
Subject: Re: vjv>d3: hahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!
_____Does the coming of a new apparatus (the electronic one) with
its multimedia text-graphic-audio simultaneous channels, open up the
rhetoric-geometry (or method-mathematics) relationship to other
approaches?
Greg and company,
Anne Malone
From: Anne R Malone
Date: Fri, 20 Sep 1996 14:07:38 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: voidboy->get me outta dis void, PLEASE
this is getting a bit too over/under my head 
From: Jsterlingw@AOL.COM
Date: Fri, 20 Sep 1996 20:04:58 -0400
Subject: Thanks but no thanks
Oh, Yeaaaa,
Well, this is what I think of you! ... You mindless, mimic, mutt of a Mental-Mummy!! Get out of here and go back to your HarHarHarlequinBraced HandBookList!!
(apparently candid posts,
apparently posts requesting to be unsubscribed (oh, don't you just love
politics!),
apparently candid, candid followup posts) and
(apparently saying privately what should not be said public-ly,
apparently passing notes between the offspring,
apparently local and long-distance telephone calls between the posters, etc.).
Keyser Soeze
The continuation of this re/inter/view will be posted on this website in approximately one week.
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