The Repression of Geology, Part I
“There’s been a lot of desecration in this place recently, and yet, Father, you continue to use this dialogic format, complete with quotation marks and relatively correct grammar and punctuation. Would you be willing to expound on this, giving particular emphasis to whether it is desecration which is important, or your own albeit weak command of social commands, or, as it is more commonly known, the protocols of communication?”
Thanks, Maggot. I appreciate the observation AND the question which you’ve extracted from it. Firstly, the desecration we’ve attempted to foist upon all and sundry – it has only succeeded in creating reactions of various sorts – one cannot count upon desecration to have any kind of political effect at all any more – its value as an act of detournement is reduced to near nothing.
“You are right about that… No one can imagine an act of detournement stringent enough, or vicious enough, or viscous enough, or putrid enough, or pukish enough, or scatological enough, to provoke any reaction at all, anymore. And yet, remarkably, if one commits an infraction of pronunciation, or of punctuation, or of spelling, or of anything which would have at any other time in history been considered not worthy of notice, let alone punishment – one will receive notice of that error or infraction, and one will be punished… one will be marked, possibly even as an idiot.”
Yes, Maggot. One could pour gasoline over oneself and light a match, and there is a fairly high probability the local press, let alone the API, the BBC, or the AFS, will let the story pass …. It is too vulgar, too commonplace, too prosaic, too banal, to warrant attention. And yet, if one wrote a letter to the editor and failed to dot the “I” or cross the “T”,that would be well-noted, and would be a strike against one. There could even follow a front page story, “Idiot demonstrates idiocy – protocols of grammar not followed – Idiot Horror Idiot Horrror… APB… All take Notice!
“Let’s be a bit clever here. Didn’t Foucault say that the ‘attention to detail’ and the increasing importance of ‘detail’ in society denote the molecularization of power… the increasingly pervasive and unavoidable and ubiquitous pinching power of society upon the individual…”
He did, Maggot. But wait a minute here…. Aren’t you using dashes and ellipsis a bit too often these days?
Thanks, Maggot. I appreciate the observation AND the question which you’ve extracted from it. Firstly, the desecration we’ve attempted to foist upon all and sundry – it has only succeeded in creating reactions of various sorts – one cannot count upon desecration to have any kind of political effect at all any more – its value as an act of detournement is reduced to near nothing.
“You are right about that… No one can imagine an act of detournement stringent enough, or vicious enough, or viscous enough, or putrid enough, or pukish enough, or scatological enough, to provoke any reaction at all, anymore. And yet, remarkably, if one commits an infraction of pronunciation, or of punctuation, or of spelling, or of anything which would have at any other time in history been considered not worthy of notice, let alone punishment – one will receive notice of that error or infraction, and one will be punished… one will be marked, possibly even as an idiot.”
Yes, Maggot. One could pour gasoline over oneself and light a match, and there is a fairly high probability the local press, let alone the API, the BBC, or the AFS, will let the story pass …. It is too vulgar, too commonplace, too prosaic, too banal, to warrant attention. And yet, if one wrote a letter to the editor and failed to dot the “I” or cross the “T”,that would be well-noted, and would be a strike against one. There could even follow a front page story, “Idiot demonstrates idiocy – protocols of grammar not followed – Idiot Horror Idiot Horrror… APB… All take Notice!
“Let’s be a bit clever here. Didn’t Foucault say that the ‘attention to detail’ and the increasing importance of ‘detail’ in society denote the molecularization of power… the increasingly pervasive and unavoidable and ubiquitous pinching power of society upon the individual…”
He did, Maggot. But wait a minute here…. Aren’t you using dashes and ellipsis a bit too often these days?
posted by Yusef Asabiyah at 2:49 AM
1 Comments:
Dear Yusef,
Thanks for your latest posts. I'm still trying to come to grips with them. To be honest, I don't really know how to respond.
So maybe I shouldn't. But still. You have been so inspiring (previously) that I'm not giving up on you!
It seems to me that you are now in the mode of the destruction of rather than the creation of concepts in the Deleuzian sense.
Heck, to quote Deleuze's friend and correspondent in his last years, Badiou, you tend to get caught in the vocabulary of your maggot's (necrophiliac) situation:
...every situation is accompanied by a language, a capacity to name that situation's elements, their relations, their qualities, their properties. And in every situation there is also "the state of the situation"--the order of its subsets. The situation's language aims at showing how an element belongs to such and such a subset. The situation is what presents the elements that constitute it; the state of the situation is what presents, not the situation's elements, but its subsets.
From this point of view the situation is a form of presentation, the state of the situation a form of representation. And knowledge, being the way we organize the situation's elements linguistically, is always a certain relation between presentation and representation. Knowledge is most simply defined as the linguistic determination of the general system of connections between presentation and representation. The set of a situation's various bodies of knowledge is "the encyclopedia" of the situation. Insofar as it refers only to itself, however, the situation is organically without truth.
In other words, Yusef, let's return to the "situation" of the Coming Enlightenment (the sequel). We need it ( - and YOU) more than ever.
OK, the subject is a "hole in being", but we can still do something!
Your activist reader,
Orla Schantz
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