Date: Fri, 05 Dec 1997 01:07:47 -0500
Subject: Re: Rights and Wrongs and Loss of Time


Hello Again:

	After being away from a computer, and thus from this group, for a while
I return to see that issues of power, Capital, time and so forth have
finally been picked up. . . what a pleasent surprise. . . I thought we
would never get around to them. . . I guess I have been in the academy
to long and have thus learned to expect the worst from discussions that
center around any of the treandy (sure back in the 80's) French
theorists. . . I share the concern that "righting the wrongs" is
dangerous in the sense that the "liberator" is always already an
oppressor and inevitably so. . .I also think that an orthodox Marxist
analysis based on a narrow conception of class warfare is at best quaint
but useless as far as resisting Capital is concerned. . . but there is
more to Marx than this, particularly the Marx that Lyotard talks about
in "Libidinal Economy", the one who is at once a "little girl" enchanted
and seduced by its monstrous power and a sober cynic who fears it but
knows it cannot be fought or destroyed. . . Under the sign and rule of
the infinite and infinitely expanding logic of power, a logic which
operates according to our most basic intuitions about time, there is no
way to avoid the fact that a "liberator" is also always oppressive, any
mode of resistance a use-value destined to be opened up as the bearer of
exchange and thus commodified, etc. . . .but so what? we would do well
to recognize this inevitability and stop wanting clean hands at all
costs, clean hands that none of us have even if we remain politically
inactive. . . the clean hands we loose when we turn on our computers
even. . . of course there are crimes and crimes and it is a subtle,
arbitrary and power ladden art to distinguish among them. . . but
intellectuals and philosophers, "post-68 radicals" in particular, need
to loose their fear of power. . . politicians, leaders, people who wield
it know or learn almost as second nature that in order to make an
ommelett one needs to break a few eggs. . . it is the nature of
politics, which by the way is quite different and oppossed to ethics
despite the ideological claims of the tradition to the contrary. . . to
engage politics is to accept one's complicity. . . and if one does not
have the stomach for it then at least one should have the stomach to
admit it and withdraw, for example as Weber puts it, "into the arms of
the old church" or something (I highly recommend Weber's "Politics as a
Vocation" on all this, a lecture he delivered right after learning that
his friend, but never political commarade, the sparticist Liebnechkt had
been murdered). . .

Sorry for rambling I just get very pasionate about all this,

ARTURO