Philosophy

This is more of a brainstorm than a post, but when I was talking about Jean Baudrillard's this morning over breakfast, it dawned on me that France had a second enlighment during the 20th Century.

The majority of the most influential French philosophers were born in the 1920s and most of them either studied, worked with or new each other through the French university system throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

They all oohed and aahed at Georges Bataille and Albert Camus. Then there was Jean Paul Sartre and his lifemate, Simone de Beauvoir was a notorious organizer and party animal.

It seems like all of these people at one point of another studied or worked with Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Michele Blanchot, or Claude Levi Strauss.

Michele Foucault was one of the few people who knew Blanchot personally. He was good friends at one point with Jacques Derrida and a had a falling out with Sartre.

Jean Baudrillard studied with Roland Barthes and so did Julia Kristeva.

Then there's Deleuze and Guattari. Everybody knew of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's magical and tempestuous working relationship.

"The university is in ruins ... Power ... no longer believes in the university. It knows fundamentally that it is only a zone of the shelter and surveillance of a whole class of a certain age, it therefore has only to select – it will find its elite elsewhere, or by other means. Diplomas are worthless ..."

Jean Baudrillard is the philosopher I seem to always forget.

I don't know which one came first into my hands, whether it was The System of Objects (Radical Thinkers) (Radical Thinkers) or For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. All I know is that Baudrillard (along with Roland Barthes) was one of the first people to show me how to think about humanity not as a given but as a deliberate construction stemming from our desire, fear and lust for Power.

Baudrillard, through his look at American culture, his ponderings on advertising and his photographic musings, taught me to look at Man and Woman literally as auto (self-made) nomies (signs). I learned with him that History becomes in this quest for autonomy, a matrix of Power through meaningful domination.

I learned with Baudrillard, far before the creation of the web and the proliferation of the anonymous personae that litter the blogosphere, that we are fictions battling to be taken on as truths. Twenty years ago and before we even heard of blogs as noise machines, I learned from hims that it is not truth we seek to unravel through writing, punditry or blogging but the spectacle of being truthful.

I have much to thank Baudrillard for his gift of knowledge even if it is a knowledge that I always seem to forget. He has inspired my distrut of cultural absolutes (truth, evidence) and its perpetuation institutions (academia, media) through his piercing discussions of American culture. Ironically, he made very real and accessible the Marxist and Nietzschean philosphies that inform my creations. He ended up making real the unreal reality of reality makers.

After the jump you'll find Arthur Kroker's euology forwarded to me from the C-NET listserve.

(Ensayo publicado en La Sarten Por El Mango: Encuentro De Escritoras Latinoamericanas (Colección La Nave y el puerto), Puerto Rico, 1985)

Las Tretas del débil
Por Josefina Ludmer

No hablaremos de la literatura femenina con rótulos ni generalizaciones universalizantes. Con esto queremos decir que rechazamos lecturas tautológicas: se sabe que en la distribución histórica de afectos, funciones y facultades (transformada en mitología, fijada en la lengua) tocó a la mujer dolor y pasión contra razón, concreto contra abstracto, adentro contra mundo, reproducción contra producción; leer estos atributos en el lenguaje y la literatura de mujeres es meramente leer lo que primero fue y sigue siendo inscripto en un espacio social. Una posibilidad de romper el círculo que confirma la diferencia en lo socialmente diferenciado es postular una inversión: leer en el discurso femenino el pensamiento abstracto, la ciencia y la política, tal como se filtran en los resquicios de lo conocido.

Hablaremos de lugares. Por un lado, un lugar común de la crítica: la Respuesta de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz a Sor Filotea; por otro lado un lugar específico: el que ocupa una mujer en el campo del saber, en una situación histórica y discursiva precisa. Respecto de los lugares comunes (los textos clásicos, que parecen decir siempre lo que se quiere leer: textos dóciles a las mutaciones), interesan porque constituyen campos de lucha donde se debaten sistemas e interpretaciones enemigas; su revisión periódica es una de las maneras de medir la transformación histórica de los modos de lectura (objetivo fundamental de la teoría crítica). Respecto del lugar específico, se trata de otro tipo de discordancia: la relación entre este espacio que esta mujer se da y ocupa, frente al que le otorga la institución y la palabra del otro: nos movemos, también, en el campo de las relaciones sociales y la producción de ideas y textos. Leemos en esta carta ciertas tretas del débil en una posición de subordinación y marginalidad.

All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth wihtout a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart.

One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

"The Myth of Sisyphus"

Albert Camus

born on this day in 1913.

I pass on the following call for papers:

Program Theme:
The Language of Violence: Critical Thinking about War and Peace

Saturday, November 18, 2006
SUNY Cortland, New York
Corey Union

Keynote Speaker:
Dr. Gail Presby, University of Detroit , Mercy

Over the last five years, the language of violence has entered public discourse more than ever before. Words like "war," "terrorism," even "peace" are being used in new ways. In this conference we want to ask questions about the use and meaning of language and the way language shapes public consciousness, ethical thinking and responses to violence (in the media, from government and military spokespeople, in entertainment, in the academy). We invite proposals from professors, activists, graduate and undergraduate students, across the disciplines, in areas relating to, but no restricted to, the rhetoric of violence. Paper presentations should be twenty minutes in length.

The deadline for proposals and abstracts is October 25, 2006.
Please send proposals for a panel, workshop, or roundtable discussion. Limit proposals to no more than 500 words. Also, send abstracts of articles (no more than 500 words) for consideration.

So Standardized School is the opposite of World-Class Education,
not its divine incarnation?
Good then.
Let's hear no more about the necessary sacrifice of consigning all children to one-dimensional forehand factories for high-priced, high-stakes stamping into quality-controlled widgets, by has-been and never-were corporate charismatics and labor union drones.

Do you know what words of advice inspire the greatest players in the world as they enter Centre Court for Wimbledon, to show what they know and can do?

“If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same”-
“If” by Rudyard Kipling.

IF we inscribed this on every standardized test booklet for every child our Congressional Coaches promise never to leave behind languishing in the locker room, IF we took it to heart ourselves, then we still might not win 'em all but maybe we could stop feeling like such losers?

I've long called test score mania (in both triumph and disaster) the two-edged sword, but "two-edged imposter" could work even better, might at least shut up the most rigid standard skunks -- clever fellow Kipling.

True art does not make one comfortable. What it does is reorder our sense of the world and our internal narrative.

I don’t believe that bare life has anything to do with art. We are all on the edge of a potential tragedy. Since I am of a certain age people around me are succumbing to various diseases. My brother-in-law is lying in a hospital bed in a stupor from a brain aneurism. My poor sister is suffering terribly. One day everything is fine, the next you are confronted with your fragile world as it collapses.

I live eight blocks north of the world trade center. My windows face the buildings. I saw the planes crash into the buildings as I was doing my morning exercises. I saw the people jumping from the burning buildings. No it was not on videotape for me it was “bare life.”

I have a second home in northeastern Pennsylvania. Huge rainstorms and snowmelts have flooded the Delaware River as well as many creeks and streams in the area. People lose their homes. One teenage girl in Livingston Manor became paralyzed with fear and could not jump to safety as her home was swept away by the floodwater. The floods are classified as one hundred year floods but they have occurred three times in the last three years.

This is a total navel-gazing moment but eff it, it's my blog!

I'm in a lot of physical and emotional pain. Forty has hit me like a frying pan on a toon's nogging and it has taken me almost a month to write about my passage into official middleagehood because ... well ... it's painful.

I don't like it.

It sucks.

I hate being old.

Not because I look old but because I feel old. Every bone and muscle in my body has started to sink into decrepitude. I don't feel emotionally older than 30 yet here I am seeing my body crash and burn further and further away from my self.

What is worse than the pain is the horrible, terrible fear that keeps me awake at night : Four years ago I woke in a pool of sweat, smacked with the horrible realization that I would be cursed with ... the gift of longevity.