Date: Wed, 31 Dec 1997 09:03:19 -0500
Subject: Re: presentation, representation


In response to my bitching Hugh wrote:


> Thanks for your words.  You do have an artistic flair. Do you
> participate
> in visual or audio arts?  Perhaps you are an accomplished stylist who
> paints, designs clothing, makes movies, creates in media other than
> words, does gourmet cooking, invents perfumes, belongs to militias,
> plays soldier in the woods, lobbies for the NRA.   Blood and guns
> indeed. Maybe you build bombs in the wilderness, invent conspiracy
> theories. Nahhhhh.....Couldn't be the guy who came on the Lyotard list 
> to discuss Lyotard works; must be an alias, a denizen of netizen or
> worse.


Blood and guns are definetely not for me. . . I have never claimed that
they are. . .I do not have the stomach for them. . . a question of
physiology perhaps. . .or a very soft, priviledged, comfortable,
"spoiled" upbringing as "mother's sunshine" and the "son of the boss". .
. always others there to do the dirty work including a father who worked
to accumulate the capital necessary to exploit, I mean employ, others to
do it. . .cowardly and proud. . .taking flight towards the rarified air
of intellectual, no not really academic rather, abstraction. . .A
"Neiman-Marxist". . .perhaps part of that sociological phenomenon that
Martin Jay describes in his book on the Frankfurt School (third
generation Jewish immigrant who has the luxury to become a scholar thus
providing the family with a kind of cultural capital which commerce
could not provide). . .but I am very aware of all of this and hence I
refuse to take all this seriously. . . as if any of this
ethico-political (what a fucking contradiction in terms. . .something
which already points out all that is so fucked up with the way we
critics and theorists, us intellectuals, operate) hand-ringing,
consience soothing, fetishistic production of amusing abstractions
amounted to anything more than something we do selfishly, for whatever
different perverse pleasures it gives each one of us. . . as if it
amounted to more than a luxurious activity we have the priviledge to be
able to engage in. . . as if it amounted to more than any other way of
distracting ourselves or enjoying ourselves. . . no different than other
hedonistic even if masochistic activities like getting stoned or going
to a fancy restaurant and splurging on a meal. . . I do not give a damn
if you pick up a gun or not. . . what pisses me off is the delusion, the
fantasy, about the importance of all this. . . the seriousness and
gravity. . .the constant fooling of oneself and of each other, and
always in an insistent heroic self-righteouness, about all this
dribbling as not only the banal pursuit it really is but as part of some
struggle for truth or justice or both or whatever. . . the childish lack
of awareness about the consequences, about the impact, about the effect,
of all this bablling. . . a road towards liberation or something corny
like that. . . please let give ourselves and each other a break. . .
sheer scholastic pursuits. . . not resistance, not really politics. . .
ethics ? sure why not. . . but that just shows how impotent, how empty,
ethics really are as anything other than that which occupies the very
narrow terrain of how we concretely spend, waste, our time and occupy
ourselves as irrelevant and insignificant specks within the social logic
and structure of an "undefeatable" capitalist system that calls us and
rules us all without exception, without escape, without an outside. . .
in defeat stop agonizing over a self-impossed duty that is just one more
ideology effect. . . at least enjoy what you do for what it really is. .
.nothing more, nothing less. . .

ARTURO