Sebastian wrote:
> I am suspicious of Foucault's
> language of transgression, his valorization of its subversive and radical
> potential, even while in other moments I am fatally attracted to it. The
> passage to me seems to rely on this view, constituting as it does an
> alternative to the "millenary language of dialectics", an alternative which
> in my opinion suffers from its own "millenary" excesses. There may indeed
> be a major experience of sexuality which exceeds the prisons of dialectical
> thought, with its logic of accumulation, which points to a general
> experience of expenditure, unreason, poetic madness that cannot be
> recuperated by the dialectic. This possibility is of interest and points
> the way toward a renegotiation of the status of dialectical thought, of our
> relation to it.
Part of my problem in reading this essay is that I have no idea what either
"dialectics" or "transgression" mean in its context. As far as "dialectics"
goes, the problem may well be my own philosophical illiteracy. But as
concerns "trangression", I think that the essay purposely plays upon the fact
that the meaning is prismatic or diffuse -- it mines this diffusiveness, just
as in the passage I quoted it mines the double meaning of "consume" (us
being "consumed/consummated", and "consumption" seen as based on need).
But at least overtly, the essay seems to be about language, transgression
in language. Of course, then one asks: what is language? Is, say,
a terrorist bombing, "language"? Is _this_ what is meant by "the
transformation of a philosophy of man as worker to a philosophy based on
a being who speaks" -- that we no longer see our actions as manifestations
of a dialectical struggle with the world, but rather as acts of language,
attempts to speak?
I think maybe I am finally on to something here. The need to speak
certainly does respond "to a code whose laws cannot be confined to
a dialectic of production". And I also would agree that there _is_ this
kind of shift of self-perception. I see it, for example, in art -- where
it is no longer meaningful to interpret artmaking as being about the
production of objects, about accumulation of "cultural capital", but
rather as being about staking claims, making relays, creating flows,
posing questions. And indeed, transgression has assumed a central place
in art. Art wants to be exhibited in places not designated for it; it
wants to use materials considered "offensive"; it wants to engage in
processes not seen as "artistic" -- it want to negotiate the wrapping of
the Reichstag, project onto architecture images of the architecure's
"other", perform acts of self-immolation, make self-destroying machines,
sit in the middle of a busy street obstructing traffic.
I guess if I was not so philosophically illiterate I might now be able
to go back to the apparent context of the essay itself and think about
its claims with respect to philosophy. But this "if" is uncrossable...
-m
> I am suspicious of Foucault's
> language of transgression, his valorization of its subversive and radical
> potential, even while in other moments I am fatally attracted to it. The
> passage to me seems to rely on this view, constituting as it does an
> alternative to the "millenary language of dialectics", an alternative which
> in my opinion suffers from its own "millenary" excesses. There may indeed
> be a major experience of sexuality which exceeds the prisons of dialectical
> thought, with its logic of accumulation, which points to a general
> experience of expenditure, unreason, poetic madness that cannot be
> recuperated by the dialectic. This possibility is of interest and points
> the way toward a renegotiation of the status of dialectical thought, of our
> relation to it.
Part of my problem in reading this essay is that I have no idea what either
"dialectics" or "transgression" mean in its context. As far as "dialectics"
goes, the problem may well be my own philosophical illiteracy. But as
concerns "trangression", I think that the essay purposely plays upon the fact
that the meaning is prismatic or diffuse -- it mines this diffusiveness, just
as in the passage I quoted it mines the double meaning of "consume" (us
being "consumed/consummated", and "consumption" seen as based on need).
But at least overtly, the essay seems to be about language, transgression
in language. Of course, then one asks: what is language? Is, say,
a terrorist bombing, "language"? Is _this_ what is meant by "the
transformation of a philosophy of man as worker to a philosophy based on
a being who speaks" -- that we no longer see our actions as manifestations
of a dialectical struggle with the world, but rather as acts of language,
attempts to speak?
I think maybe I am finally on to something here. The need to speak
certainly does respond "to a code whose laws cannot be confined to
a dialectic of production". And I also would agree that there _is_ this
kind of shift of self-perception. I see it, for example, in art -- where
it is no longer meaningful to interpret artmaking as being about the
production of objects, about accumulation of "cultural capital", but
rather as being about staking claims, making relays, creating flows,
posing questions. And indeed, transgression has assumed a central place
in art. Art wants to be exhibited in places not designated for it; it
wants to use materials considered "offensive"; it wants to engage in
processes not seen as "artistic" -- it want to negotiate the wrapping of
the Reichstag, project onto architecture images of the architecure's
"other", perform acts of self-immolation, make self-destroying machines,
sit in the middle of a busy street obstructing traffic.
I guess if I was not so philosophically illiterate I might now be able
to go back to the apparent context of the essay itself and think about
its claims with respect to philosophy. But this "if" is uncrossable...
-m