Re: do we need to speak clearly?


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Dear Daniel,

Such an impassioned post! Thankyou so much for your fascinating
response.

> i won't try and go through your mail line by line as it encompasses
such
a lot and sends me off in various directions.

But your post heads off in so many more directions!

i'm glad you took my
non-comprehenson as it was intended (ie. genuinely) (did that make
sense?) and many thanks for your attempts at further explanation.

That's interesting, isn't it: the terrible ambiguity of email. Letters
have this characteristic, which fascinates JD and makes him put the
question to himself, particularly in The Post Card, for if speech is
only a kind of writing then writning per se should not be dependent on
speech re: tone of vox etc. Writing per se would have it's own signals
with which to negoatiate - but it certainly poses a difficulty for the
critique of phonocentrism, which, by the way, you can find in Gombrich
who argues that non-verbal communication (esp.painting) is constantly
"compensating" for the absence of speech (its strategies and signals are
merely attempts to duplicate the transparency of speech). Now my last
post on the negotiation of meaning - which would extend to speech (and
exchange in general) - has relevance to this. Speech is far from
transparent.... but where does that leave the peculiar ambiguity of the
email, the postcard?

one of the first things that sprang to mind was "beware of greeks
bearing gifts"!!

Absolutely! And what was I trying to sneak past you in my last post.
Perhaps this: the notion of the whisper, the margins, the between the
lines, while it can be sound re: the fact that exchange partakes of the
logic of practice rather than the logic of logic does little to break
signs free of the determining power of codes. The whisper, the strategy,
is already coded......

which seemed quite funny and then perhaps not without
resonance... what's hidden in the gift of language? what's waiting
inside?

This "gift of language" reminds me of Lacan's observations - what the
child receives by entering into the "symbolic order" (i.e. the regime of
coded exchange, even if it is not ruled over by the *Transcendental
Signifier*[i.e. the signifier of signification or the "Phallus"]) is
power. Power to make specific demands. But what is the cost of such
power?, such freedom? Only a little freedom, only a little desire, a
scrap, a residue, a modicum of ego. What is lost in submitting to
Oedipus? Only an unrealistic wish, the Pleasure Principle? It will
submit.

yes, i think the idea of linguistic exchanges is important to
what i was trying to express/question, although i wouldn't have cast it
in those terms. (i'm suffering a little here from a rather slender
engagement with Derrida/ deconstruction, i think.)

Too demure, I think, given what follows-

what i was getting
at could be rephrased along the lines of 'do we have to speak as a
(necessarily social) exchange, can't we speak as a gift - and as a gift
to no one in particular, as a sacrifice to ourselves...?' (which
certainly wouldn't be the same as sacrificing ourselves!)

There is a Derrida text called The Gift of Death which deals with just
this question. It also appears in another JD text called Aporias. In
both texts, the free gift, the gift of dying for another, of sacrifice,
appears unlikely, but absolutely necessary, and somehow inescapable
(how's that for whispering?). Unlikely becuase the gift is a) always
destined for another (even oneself as another) and implicated in duty;
necessary in order to avoid meaninglessness and reification, in order
to escape slavery, and inescapable because the gift never arrives,
because the free gift is always being given, life is expenditure, etc.
Poor summary, I know, but..... Another critical text in this regard is
in Writing and Difference and deals with Bataille and Hegel ("From
Restricted to General Economy"[sic]). Most of the same problems emerge
in each text, but from different angles, of course.

i once saw (please excuse this non-sequiter pop reference!) the beatles
"fool on the hill' played over film of hitler and nazi rallies. this
seemed to me an incredibly dubious an unsubstantial reading of the songs

lyrics - and is somehow relevant here - (misquote from memory:)

How dreadful! But, of course, its making a point via counterpoint, eh?
The innocence of Lennon/McCartney and the guilt of Hitler, the Nazis,
etc. On the other hand, "nobody ever does evil knowingly"?

"...but nobody seems to hear him or the things he appears to say, and he

never listens to them, but the fool on the hill, sees the sun going
down, and the eyes in his head see the world spinning round..."

cutting this with hitler seems to bring out an idea of speech, of what
it is to speak -

Yes. The whole problem of rhetoric and populism of which our democracy
is, supposedly, but perhaps not really, a species, whether or not it is
anything like that of the Athenians. Thucidides versus Habermas?
Thrasymachus versus Socrates? Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.

of how it has to be social, has to respect the social
or it is threatening/dangerous/not even really speaking. "appears" to
say - does he really say anything if he is not listened to (?) or if
what he says is contra the social status quo(?) that's one thread. but
also (to extricate it from this half-arsed connection) this is a
decidedly schizo image, with social disconnection coupled with
cosmic/astronomical connections...

Yes. I think there is a schizo zone here - but is it in undecidability
qua JD? I think not. But what about this distinction you have set up
qua D&G? Let me begin from a neurotic position, one I am quite familiar
with let me tell you, what D&G call "paranoid", "Oedipalized",
"captured", locked in by the Apparatuses, "organicized", "striated", not
"imperceptible", ever recharging the signifier at the centre, etc. From
this position the question arises re: deception. Hitler, Pericles and
the Trojan Horse. This side sustains a number of molar divisions, each
with its undecidabilities, its possibilities:
1. True vs False
2. Normal vs. Insane
3. Logical vs. Illogical
4. Conserved vs. Lost
5. Etc.
It not only sustains its distinctions, but sustains the distinction
between preserving these distinctions and losing them. Now this loss is
"rational" in the hands of JD? It is inevitable? and thereby we see this
sustaining as a violence, a forced memory, a false memory, a Trojan
Horse, an operation of an ideological construct. But what is on the
other hand? Just difference, pure negativity. And this leaves us in
undecidability, which has a complex relation to political praxis,
staving off fanaticism and firing a rejection of quietism, running the
risk of quietism, running the risk of creating a certain dogma, of
sustaining the distinction by default, on one side as it were?

Now on the other hand there is the schizo, in which these distinctions
are dissolved, molecularized. The schizo is the insane mirror of the
neurotic, the madman's discourse that makes the normal see itself as
mad. Now the normal, the neurotic, puts the question to the schizo: Has
your discourse escaped origin and destination, which are myths perhaps,
but a priori truths just the same? Can the schiz decieve itself, decieve
normality? The only possible critique of this would be ipso facto
normal, which is to say, mad, because it would undo the distinction
between the normal and logical and the schiz and illogical? So that one
can remain on the side of normality only by going a bit mad, only by
listening to madness, and thereby giving the discourse of madness an
origin and destination, measuring it by truth and deception, and thereby
making it no longer schiz but normal, leaving it, however, as a
negativity, but a charged one, energetically charged, undoing both
itself and the normal, and thereby returning to truth.

the schizo who speaks but is not heard - doesn't even wish to be heard
on one side, and "can't" be heard due to the interpretative
medical/psychoanalytical framework that filters what is said in any
case... to stop speaking, to stop speaking clearly -- to start
stuttering, stammering in ones own language? to become a foreigner in
ones own tongue?? to stop writing/speaking and start singing, like
henry miller? to take a walk on your own and talk on your own (which is
not necessarily the same as to yourself), as a walk, to speak as a
stroll... who is being spoken to at the beginning (i haven't read it
all!) of beckett's trilogy? where is the exchange? it's more like a
suicide leap into the abyss!! or in kafka - does he fulfil an exchange
with his twisting stories that aren't really stories? that have no
endings, that are possibly unfinished, that even when they end have no
"ending"?

And so the schiz speaks but does so without speaking, sends a message
without sending. These traits in no way distinguish it from normality,
just as its stutter in no way breaks down the normal perception of its
discourse as mad. Taken together, these two propositions deconstruct
normality (making it mad), but only by deconstructing the schiz (making
it normal), and so deconstructing the distinction between normal and
schiz, giving the schiz back to truth and truth to impossibility, making
the deconstruction of the normoschizoid fall prey to itself, fall into
madness. And this project must be undertaken from the side of normality,
for why would the schiz be interested in it. It must reamain
disintrested in order to remain schiz, in order to operate, for
normality, as it's dark mirror. And so to the ever pregnant and
vociferous silence of the madman. On the schiz side there is nothing to
say......

again, different lines appear connected here. was deleuzes
reluctance/refusal to debate his "philosophy" a refusal to make his
philosophy an exchange? a reluctance to speak more clearly? to make his

work and life a "gift" - a non-recuperable expenditure (to dip into
bataille)? and is something similar in the oft quoted approah he took
to writing about other philosophers - (misquote) "giving them something
their own but monstrous"? something that was not exactly an exchange -
but perhaps was a gift, a monstrous gift that couldn't be returned...?

perhaps...

And yet it is all to normal? A deception? A simulation of schiz? To view
it through normality, through Plato, through JD.

i don't know if i've said anything clear (!) or responded to your post
very well. i'm not sure i caught all those whispers... hopefully this
is of interest to you at least... i feel the space of this conversation
has opened up to the extent i'm not sure i can map it, or, as a
consequence, decide which way to head.

Fascinating! As to where it should head, I can only offer you paranoid
directions.

but that's certainly a good feeling...

LOL

:) Chris

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<HTML>
Dear Daniel,

<P>Such an impassioned post! Thankyou so much for your fascinating response.

<P>> i won't try and go through your mail line by line as it encompasses
such
<BR>a lot and sends me off in various directions.

<P>But your post heads off in so many more directions!

<P>i'm glad you took my
<BR>non-comprehenson as it was intended (ie. genuinely) (did that make
<BR>sense?) and many thanks for your attempts at further&nbsp; explanation.

<P>That's interesting, isn't it: the terrible ambiguity of email. Letters
have this characteristic, which fascinates JD and makes him put the question
to himself, particularly in <I>The Post Card</I>, for if speech is only
a kind of writing then writning per se should not be dependent on speech
re: tone of vox etc. Writing per se would have it's own signals with which
to negoatiate - but it certainly poses a difficulty for the critique of
phonocentrism, which, by the way, you can find in Gombrich who argues that
non-verbal communication (esp.painting) is constantly "compensating" for
the absence of speech (its strategies and signals are merely attempts to
duplicate the transparency of speech). Now my last post on the negotiation
of meaning - which would extend to speech (and exchange in general) - has
relevance to this. Speech is far from transparent.... but where does that
leave the peculiar ambiguity of the email, the postcard?

<P>one of the first things that sprang to mind was "beware of greeks
<BR>bearing gifts"!!

<P>Absolutely! And what was I trying to sneak past you in my last post.
Perhaps this: the notion of the whisper, the margins, the between the lines,
while it can be sound re: the fact that exchange partakes of the logic
of practice rather than the logic of logic does little to break signs free
of the determining power of codes. The whisper, the strategy, is already
coded......

<P>which seemed quite funny and then perhaps not without
<BR>resonance... what's hidden in the gift of language? what's waiting
<BR>inside?

<P>This "gift of language" reminds me of Lacan's observations - what the
child receives by entering into the "symbolic order" (i.e. the regime of
coded exchange, even if it is not ruled over by the *Transcendental Signifier*[i.e.
the signifier of signification or the "Phallus"]) is power. Power to make
specific demands. But what is the cost of such power?, such freedom? Only
a little freedom, only a little desire, a scrap, a residue, a modicum of
ego. What is lost in submitting to Oedipus? Only an unrealistic wish, the
Pleasure Principle? It will submit.

<P>yes, i think the idea of linguistic exchanges is important to
<BR>what i was trying to express/question, although i wouldn't have cast
it
<BR>in those terms. (i'm suffering a little here from a rather slender
<BR>engagement with Derrida/ deconstruction, i think.)

<P>Too demure, I think, given what follows-

<P>what i was getting
<BR>at could be rephrased along the lines of 'do we have to speak as a
<BR>(necessarily social) exchange, can't we speak as a gift - and as a
gift
<BR>to no one in particular, as a sacrifice to ourselves...?' (which
<BR>certainly wouldn't be the same as sacrificing ourselves!)

<P>There is a Derrida text called <I>The Gift of Death</I> which deals
with just this question. It also appears in another JD text called <I>Aporias</I>.
In both texts, the free gift, the gift of dying for another, of sacrifice,
appears unlikely, but absolutely necessary, and somehow inescapable (how's
that for whispering?).&nbsp; Unlikely becuase the gift is a) always destined
for another (even oneself as another) and implicated in duty; necessary
in order to avoid meaninglessness and reification, in&nbsp; order to escape
slavery, and inescapable because the gift never arrives, because the free
gift is always being given, life is expenditure, etc. Poor summary, I know,
but..... Another critical text in this regard is in <I>Writing and Difference</I>
and deals with Bataille and Hegel ("From Restricted to General Economy"[sic]).
Most of the same problems emerge in each text, but from different angles,
of course.

<P>i once saw (please excuse this non-sequiter pop reference!) the beatles
<BR>"fool on the hill' played over film of hitler and nazi rallies.&nbsp;
this
<BR>seemed to me an incredibly dubious an unsubstantial reading of the
songs
<BR>lyrics - and is somehow relevant here - (misquote from memory:)

<P>How dreadful! But, of course, its making a point via counterpoint, eh?
The innocence of Lennon/McCartney and the guilt of Hitler, the Nazis, etc.
On the other hand, "nobody ever does evil knowingly"?

<P>"...but nobody seems to hear him or the things he appears to say, and
he
<BR>never listens to them, but the fool on the hill, sees the sun going
<BR>down, and the eyes in his head see the world spinning round..."

<P>cutting this with hitler seems to bring out an idea of speech, of what
<BR>it is to speak -

<P>Yes. The whole problem of rhetoric and populism of which our democracy
is, supposedly, but perhaps not really, a species, whether or not it is
anything like that of the Athenians. Thucidides versus Habermas? Thrasymachus
versus Socrates? Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.

<P>of how it has to be social, has to respect the social
<BR>or it is threatening/dangerous/not even really speaking.&nbsp; "appears"
to
<BR>say - does he really say anything if he is not listened to (?) or if
<BR>what he says is contra the social status quo(?) that's one thread.
but
<BR>also (to extricate it from this half-arsed connection) this is a
<BR>decidedly schizo image, with social disconnection coupled with
<BR>cosmic/astronomical connections...

<P>Yes. I think there is a schizo zone here - but is it in undecidability
qua JD? I think not.&nbsp; But what about this distinction you have set
up qua D&amp;G? Let me begin from a neurotic position, one I am quite familiar
with let me tell you, what D&amp;G call "paranoid", "Oedipalized", "captured",
locked in by the Apparatuses, "organicized", "striated", not "imperceptible",
ever recharging the signifier at the centre, etc. From this position the
question arises re: deception. Hitler, Pericles and the Trojan Horse. This
side sustains a number of molar divisions, each with its undecidabilities,
its possibilities:
<BR>1. True vs False
<BR>2. Normal vs. Insane
<BR>3. Logical vs. Illogical
<BR>4. Conserved vs. Lost
<BR>5. Etc.
<BR>It not only sustains its distinctions, but sustains the distinction
between preserving these distinctions and losing them. Now this loss is
"rational" in the hands of JD? It is inevitable? and thereby we see this
sustaining as a violence, a forced memory, a false memory, a Trojan Horse,
an operation of an ideological construct. But what is on the other hand?
Just difference, pure negativity. And this leaves us in undecidability,
which has a complex relation to political praxis, staving off fanaticism
and firing a rejection of quietism, running the risk of quietism, running
the risk of creating a certain dogma, of sustaining the distinction by
default, on one side as it were?

<P>Now on the other hand there is the schizo, in which these distinctions
are dissolved, molecularized. The schizo is the insane mirror of the neurotic,
the madman's discourse that makes the normal see itself as mad. Now the
normal, the neurotic, puts the question to the schizo: Has your discourse
escaped origin and destination, which are myths perhaps, but a priori truths
just the same? Can the schiz decieve itself, decieve normality? The only
possible critique of this would be ipso facto normal, which is to say,
mad, because it would undo the distinction between the normal and logical
and the schiz and illogical? So that one can remain on the side of normality
only by going a bit mad, only by listening to madness, and thereby giving
the discourse of madness an origin and destination, measuring it by truth
and deception, and thereby making it no longer schiz but normal, leaving
it, however, as a negativity, but a charged one, energetically charged,
undoing both itself and the normal, and thereby returning to truth.

<P>the schizo who speaks but is not heard - doesn't even wish to be heard
<BR>on one side, and "can't" be heard due to the interpretative
<BR>medical/psychoanalytical framework that filters what is said in any
<BR>case...&nbsp; to stop speaking, to stop speaking clearly -- to start
<BR>stuttering, stammering in ones own language? to become a foreigner
in
<BR>ones own tongue??&nbsp; to stop writing/speaking and start singing,
like
<BR>henry miller? to take a walk on your own and talk on your own (which
is
<BR>not necessarily the same as to yourself), as a walk, to speak as a
<BR>stroll... who is being spoken to at the beginning&nbsp; (i haven't
read it
<BR>all!) of beckett's trilogy? where is the exchange? it's more like a
<BR>suicide leap into the abyss!!&nbsp; or in kafka - does he fulfil an
exchange
<BR>with his twisting stories that aren't really stories? that have no
<BR>endings, that are possibly unfinished, that even when they end have
no
<BR>"ending"?

<P>And so the schiz speaks but does so without speaking, sends a message
without sending. These traits in no way distinguish it from normality,
just as its stutter in no way breaks down the normal perception of its
discourse as mad.&nbsp; Taken together, these two propositions deconstruct
normality (making it mad), but only by deconstructing the schiz (making
it normal), and so deconstructing the distinction between normal and schiz,
giving the schiz back to truth and truth to impossibility, making the deconstruction
of the normoschizoid fall prey to itself, fall into madness. And this project
must be undertaken from the side of normality, for why would the schiz
be interested in it. It must reamain disintrested in order to remain schiz,&nbsp;
in order to operate, for normality, as it's dark mirror. And so to the
ever pregnant and vociferous silence of the madman. On the schiz side there
is <I>nothing to say......</I>

<P>again,&nbsp; different lines appear connected here.&nbsp; was deleuzes
<BR>reluctance/refusal to&nbsp; debate his "philosophy" a refusal to make
his
<BR>philosophy an exchange? a reluctance to speak more clearly?&nbsp; to
make his
<BR>work and life a "gift" - a non-recuperable expenditure (to dip into
<BR>bataille)?&nbsp; and is something similar in the oft quoted approah
he took
<BR>to writing about other philosophers - (misquote) "giving them something
<BR>their own but monstrous"? something that was not exactly an exchange
-
<BR>but perhaps was a gift, a monstrous gift that couldn't be returned...?

<P>perhaps...

<P>And yet it is all to normal? A deception? A simulation of schiz? To
view it through normality, through Plato, through JD.

<P>i don't know if i've said anything clear (!) or responded to your post
<BR>very well.&nbsp; i'm not sure i caught all those whispers... hopefully
this
<BR>is of interest to you at least... i feel the space of this conversation
<BR>has opened up to the extent i'm not sure i can map it, or, as a
<BR>consequence, decide which way to head.

<P>Fascinating! As to where it should head, I can only offer you paranoid
directions.

<P>but that's certainly a good feeling...

<P>LOL

<P>:) Chris</HTML>

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