Date: Wed, 31 Dec 1997 18:24:15 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Re: presentation, representation


Arturo,

If you don't like "babbling" why continue to be on this list?  For some of
us these discussions are a pleasure--I doubt any of us take them to be
more important than what they are.  

This mailing list is a workshop for some of us, to put forward what each
of us is studying or reading at the present time. It
gives us pleasure to do this, it is a delight, and I find it suspicious
and strange of you to take issue with people finding delight in talk.  So
what if it is babbling--then so be it.  At least it's fun.

Matt Wettlaufer

On Wed, 31 Dec 1997, Arturo Cherbowski wrote:

> 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
>