Date: Sat, 15 Nov 1997 15:38:06 -0500
Subject: Re: Query


Hi. . .Arturo here. . .

	After reading hugh's and beth's recent posts I became even more
perturbed and intrigued by the questions about power and
matter/material. . .no actually Capital to be entirely honest. . . which
I tried to raise before. . .by naming God, the father, foundational
political documents and hence of course LANGUAGE, the question of power
appears at least kmplicitly and indirectly but Capital (or whatever
other designator for your preffered understanding of the material) fully
disappeared and I am not satisfied by simply thinking that one cannot
ever include and address everything, that exclusions are innocent and
should not always be read in either a freudian model of repression or a
derridian-like ofsucation like the "erasure". . . Capital (matter if you
will) is not just anything nor is it innocent and particularly not in
the world we live. . . one which is just starting to develop a hangoner
after years of intoxication produced by "the global triumph of capital.
. . the real end of history" celebratory and ideological (in the
pejorative sense) kind of bullshit which forbetter orworse affected all
of us regardless of our political identities and commitments. . . add to
this that we are indeed talking about things such as authority in
relation to what I will call "the call" (why this word for Lyotard's
concept of the address in particular? Because of its great Weberian
connection. . .check out his (Weber's) famous "vocation" lectures) and
about language  and it is even clearer that the exclusion of Capital is
in and of itself indeed tremendously important, problematic, indicative,
symptomatic, etc. etc. . . . and if this not so much for us here at
least then, and particularly for sombody who is not only the author of
"Le Differend" but also, as I said before, the author of "Libidinal
Economy", somebody with a past deeply tied to what happened in Algeria
"way back then", sombody who has made and continues to make good use of
his radical credentials either as a believer (then) or as desillusioned,
cynical, perhaps mature, in any case a preacher of the kinds of
apostasies that began to gather fame and fortune in France after '68. .
. and more mundanely and less heady ( but for this perhaps mure
important and revealing) somebody who I had the pleasure of hearing, in
many moments of the kind of relaxation and innocence that happens when
the theoretical mask drops and the language of philosophy quites to give
way to the many of concrete everyday life, prioritize money in a variety
of ways (i.e. bitching about his salary and how he would not accept a
position offered to him for the money offered undervalued his prestige)
not even as apersonal friend but as he established his authority and
called to me in the role of a professor teaching an over-suscribed
graduate seminar, a seminar in which the students as addresses were
addressed exclusively as anonymous and in a sense interchangeable, like
commodities to pus hmy point and in its tritness also self-ironize it. .
. or likr the zeros and ones in this computer( to me always there if
even behind the curtains in that oft-quoted but seldom read
goverment-commisioned (!!!!) study of Lyotard's, "The Post-Modern
Condition") importantly linked to a variety of calls (including these in
this electronic exchange) in this so called "age of information". . .



											ARTURO


P.S. Sorry if it seems like I rambled and for the peculiar punctuation
which perhaps makes this impossible to read. . .if it means anything I
see it as the product of a certai+n passion evoked here and thus
unaviodable. . .Hugh I hope you took no offense about my comme+nts
+regarding your name. . .if you did I am terribly sorry upon
rereadingthem they dtrike me as very in appropriate. . .what the hell
wasI thinking?. . . I canonly say that I did it because for whatever
eccentric reason I really liked it and was fascinated by it and thus it
made me assume that it had to be a self-given handle for birthnames are
seldom so great (why it struck me so I really cannot say, I think I
erroneously sexualized it. . .Huge Bone not Hugh Bone. . . and I thought
that perhaps it was on purpose as a wayof indirectly challenging a space
for theory, spaces which at least in my experience tend to be
puritanical, repressive, quasi-proper and falsely refined and
good-mannered (and seldom good). . .and thus a meaningless, small and
trivial attempt at rebelion and provocation, the kind I've come to like
more and more the more they strike me as powerless, and hence as
farcical and simply funny. . .boy, was I embaressed when I realixed that
it was hugh and not meant to signify bone in it phallic sense. . (damn,
I am sorry again, it seems I ramble in my apologies as well. . . a
symptom of academic sickness perhaps. . . I will try to cut it down,
just do not loose patience just yet)