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...I write under a new subject-, thread-heading because I don't want
to outstay my welcome and what I have to say, having only niche
interest, ought not deflect interest away from the main subjects of
discussion... with which caveats:<br>
<br>
Dear <<empyreans>>, Johannes,<br>
<br>
You rightly point to Alan's reply to a comment I made about purging
impurity as being interesting: <br>
<pre wrap="">in fact all that is occurring <span class="moz-txt-underscore"><span class="moz-txt-tag">_</span>is<span class="moz-txt-tag">_</span></span> impurity, and the incompetence of the regime finds this intolerable. </pre>
...and you ask about Minus Theatre in relation to resistance. <br>
<br>
It is worth returning to another point of Alan's, about the <br>
<pre wrap="">résistance</pre>
which you noted as also being, this time <i>strangely</i>,
interesting: <br>
<br>
"Something reminds me of the French resistance, which romanticized
itself, found itself as resistance, acted piecemeal, and so forth.
Like a lot of other resistances, and micro-cultures grow out of
these - literatures, and here in the U.S. there are artworlds
responding in all sorts of ways (for example the anthology Resist
Much / Obey Little which just came out)."<br>
<br>
Mark Fisher, who sadly died recently (which is an egregious
understatement of the depression he, as they usually say of cancer,
fought bravely, and died fighting), differentiates between the <i>weird
</i>and the <i>eerie</i>: the latter is the feeling that nothing is
there where there ought to have been something; the former is the
feeling that something is there which ought not be. <br>
<br>
My problem with resistance is its totalisation of the whole
problematic field of what it is that is resisted. With that
totalisation--and Alan has remarked on this tendency to respond to
what is locally and specifically constellated as if to a
totality--comes an understanding, in the strong sense of <i>supporting</i>
or <i>grounding</i>, of, for example, Nazism. So that the question
of what resistance is comes from what is resisted, what is
understood as being that to which resistance responds.<br>
<br>
Did, say, the Resistance in France resist Nazism? This is an
impossible question because Nazism did not achieve the totality of
what we now understand by it until after the Nuremberg Trials. Would
the Resistance have been such if it had understood, had had an
immanent understanding, of the implacable evil it was resisting?
(Its romanticising plays on the possibility of it having this weird
foreknowledge.)<br>
<br>
Although Arendt is considered to have demystified Nazism in all its
horrific banality, what would it have meant (and what does it mean
now) to resist such a banality? (to have such an understanding of
banality?)<br>
<br>
Is that one resists all one needs to know? as just a matter of
doing? (In this, I think, lies the reason to question totality, as a
weird knowledge of something: but, resisting, actively, is not this
a form of knowledge? Or is it eerily acting on what is not there?)
(In Arendt, is not banality simply this: a failure of imagination?)<br>
<br>
How do we gain an idea (and I would suggest that an idea is a
totalising image, that the world is reducible to an image because it
is not one) of what, by resisting, we are resisting?<br>
<br>
The Resistance constitutes Nazism in its engagement with it. The
Left (not given up on, Johannes) is the eerie absence of an adequate
image for contemporary resistance.<br>
<br>
What Minus has tried is weird, to make an adequate image, to
understand, support, ground Left resistance. Its subterranean
strategy is not to resist but to escape meaning, essentially
decomposing meaning, distributing its essential elements, its
languages, in an energetic matrix (exactly a <i>soil</i>), and
spending its riches to make what is not there, in an expenditure
without hope or need of recompense--minus. <br>
<br>
Why? What's this? <br>
<br>
To break a cycle by showing that the energy which it requires, to
roll out the future from the present, need not be put back into it,
is not locked into it, except by force of a present, moral, natural
and organic order. So the energy that goes into resistance, the same
as the energy that goes into maintaining an order that is resisted,
can be freed-(without a resistance that has taken on some of the
tenor of a <i>ressentiment</i>)-in a public and collective
spectacle, with the splendour of its profligate expenditure,
exalting in an effort that is limitless because it knows no bounds.<br>
<i></i><br>
(Suicide rates in New Zealand allegedly outnumber the toll of those
who die on roads; although millions are spent on informing the
public about the dangers of driving in New Zealand, very little is
spent on informing the public about the dangers of living.)<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
Simon<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://squarewhiteworld.com/">http://squarewhiteworld.com/</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
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