[-empyre-] breaking out of prison...

[ryan griffis <grifray@yahoo.com>]

McKenzie Wark wrote:

> Which is not to say there aren't other struggles. I just heard
> Rev. Jesse Jackson address the rally of NYU's graduate
> student union, and he drew together the threads of race
> and class and gender very well. And pointed out, in
> passng, that the growth industry in many 'red state'
> towns is the prisons.

it's not just "red states" that are building the prison-industrial 
complex to mammoth proportions. As the artist/geographer Trevor Paglen 
points out, California has the third largest prison system in the world 
(after the US as a whole and China).
http://paglen.com/pages/projects/carceral/index.htm
the manner in which those fields J. Jackson discussed (race, gender, 
economix) all come together to create the violent reality that somehow 
passes for "sane" makes me want to see matrixial space discussed more, 
as it sounds like Kate's asking us to move into a space that hasn't 
been really dealt with here.
i, for one, feel completely at a loss, as all the languages i have seem 
very rooted in a similar space - analytic rationalism. i've been 
reading Greg Ulmer's Teletheory recently, and he gets into the 
difference between hermeneutic and heuretic or analytic reason and 
inventive reason. i don't think this is heading towards a matrixial 
space however.
When Kate says the following of subRosa's work:

> I'm not sure, but I think that
> maybe, like much feminist work, it is really working at the limits of
> phallic logic and not transgressing those boundaries to move into an
> expanded Symbolic.

i'm wondering what is meant exactly. is it because they're engaging the 
sphere of biotech (among other things) from the position of critique? 
in other words, by critiquing the development of technology, and 
pointing to its contradictions for the humanist goals of the 
enlightenment, they are staying within its confines?
Is there a form of critique that exists "beyond" the boundaries of 
"phallic logic"? or would it become simply transformative?
i guess my concern here is to avoid a hallucinatory retreat from 
conflict - which i know is not the point.
in some ways this touches on the conversation between Raul and McKenzie 
over the relationship between culture and technology. my impulse is to 
see McKenzie's point that regardless of whether or not a given culture 
accepts the colonial desires of, let's say biotech, the technology will 
act and do what it was designed to do. This may be unintended (yet 
still designed) consequences, like the genetic flow of GE material into 
ancient corn stocks in Chiapas, or deliberate acts, like the illegal 
distribution of GE corn by Monsanto in many parts of South America. but 
at the same time i value Raul's denial of colonial centrality and its 
affect of agency.
How does one resist, confront, critique this activity if not from a 
position that holds it accountable to the ideals that it is supposed to 
embody, yet actually defeats (hence makes a contradiction).
Are there examples of confrontational politics that aren't using 
phallic logic?
Or would these concerns not exist within a matrixial space? i'm aware 
that i'm expressing a binary relationship between the phallic and 
matrixial, which maybe isn't the case.
perhaps i need to read more from the list Kate posted early on...
best,
ryan