Dear <<empyreans>>,
Two moments:
[to talk to Aristide Antonas's post]
escaping work or the work of escaping the representation according to
which the telos of every field is visibility correlates with the work of
resisting. How to encourage escape but by an escapist's strategy that
doesn't end up in escapism? What David Foster Wallace calls the liberal
education has this good and admirable goal in its sights, by giving the
student to gain insight into the chains binding them to ways of thinking
and ways of behaving, leading the student to ask questions, which in
themselves are nodal points of escape - points all too soon coopted into
an optic of resistance, like the field of a mass action. Recuperation of
resistance as information.
A new barbarism is intriguing. It smacks of a desire for an effort of
thought, of critical thought, or archeology - shouldn't that be a
geology? as in a crossing of the threshold of slowmo? - with the quick
violence of the earth as the upsetter? The point is taken, however, that
this cooption of liberatory knowledge to information, that is,
representation, and this appropriation of action to the field of
visibility, likewise, representation, tank up civilization - but as we
know it, uncommonly well.
The desperation of facing urgent situations without recourse to action,
is it more or less a black hole for the civilian, more or less a
barbarism, for the city, than "spontaneous unorganised violence due to
the urgency of desperate situations"?
The political space need not immediately become a place enclosed by the
three theatrical walls of a living archive accessible by screen imagery,
its fourth porous wall, its magic. If it is not an open space any more,
we should look for the exits?
I must admit, I am attracted rather than repelled by the concatenation
of political space, live archive and interweb or net. And I would like
to add the note that it might be precisely the violence and the urgency
of desperate situations that make the thought think. Less a tank, than a
gnawing at the earth, a disturbance in the field, a sudden inrush, a
tremour, "more than surface, less than depth." An illiberal, illegal,
unauthorised, unorganised and nonhuman violence to the fields of thought
and action.
Secondly, I have been thrown by recent posts seeking to establish fields
of names and negotiate those fields in terms of singular actions,
singular movements. To identify them with the singularity of an event or
a monad. Whether talking of an historically unfolding field of political
action, liberatory or encapturing. Or, in fact, enchanting and magical.
If we are with Badiou, then the event itself, in its singularity, has
given rise to this open set of subjectivities we know by their names. If
however we are with Deleuze, then the individual as a diffuse, clear
confused, distinct obscure field is the event and the mass captured by
its monadic singularity has escaped representation and cannot in turn
comprise representatives of whatever revolution in thought and action
has occurred. Except as a branding exercise?
Best,
Simon Taylor
www.squarewhiteworld.com
www.brazilcoffee.co.nz
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