[-empyre-] para-nodal

[Marc Leger]

hi all,
first, a technical note - i've had problem posting to the list so i am
cc'ing to you individually as well and to Christina in case things go wrong

overall, just to refresh, my link to this discussion is in relation to what
we could call contemporary avant-garde practices and to criticism of some
contemporary art models such as community art, art activism, relational
aesthetics, dialogical aesthetics, etc.  i work with psychoanalysis and
marxist sociology primarily though i can relate to critical theories of
various sorts, having be trained in post-colonial, feminist and queer
theory.  my goal so far has been to unpack some of the assumptions involved
in simply going ahead with work that fits in with queer relational,
especially as that is linked to cultural production and creative labour.

in reply to Christiane, my apologies if i misconstrued your arguments -
which i could have confused with some of the other postings.  at least we
are clear on some things.  i completely agree with you that contemporary
practice and the critique of aesthetics is informed by previous models.
 historicity is another issue, as i am not a (new) historicist.  so, anyway,
i think we agree.  also, as i mentioned, i endorse Peter Burger's concept of
historical and neo-avant-garde and feel that 70s pluralism marks a shift
away from neo-avant-garde toward what Hal Foster terms arrière-avant-gardism
(of which Bourriaud's theory is a variant, especially in the way it is
completely inconsistent in its reference to past models - which i think we
agree on as well).  my own work is concerned with contemporary class
composition and the way that common uses of post-structuralism works in
terms of petty bourgeois allodoxia.  for example, "socially constructed"
usually tells us less about ideology and works more like a misplaced "false
consciousness" argument.

in reply to Robert - on parasitism.  if you use the term in the way that
Michel Serres uses it i think that at least we can talk about mediation.
 otherwise, it seems to me to come close to transgression (though with the
kind of combinatorial, differential effects that are typically attributed to
the distinction between modern and postmodern.  in my first year undergrad
classes i usually hand out the table that Jameson borrowed from Hassan that
lists the schematic differences between modernism and postmodernism:
form/antiform, design/chance, hierarchy/anarchy, mastery/exhaustion,
distance/participation, centring/dispersal.  i tell my students (somewhat
cynically) that if you want to be successful in today's neoliberal
institutions, just play the right side against the left.  what i offer as an
alternative to this is the notion of the subject as para-nodal (as opposed
to networked), always in a sort of disconnceted, aposite relation to the
symbolic order.

this brings me to the difference between Foucauldian parrhesiastic ethics
and what Zizek refers to as the blackmail of contemporary politics - the
forced choice situations that condition most discussions of radical and
revolutionary politics and the prohibitions against them - to the extent
that i would say there is a prohibition on the prohibition itself: a) we're
not supposed to talk about avant-gardism because it's supposedly modernist
and apparently dialectics is over and replaced by Foucault, Deleuze,
Lyotard, etc, and b) we're not supposed to admit that there is a prohibition
- it is rather the obscene underside of the official discussion.  on the
question of post-structuralism phenomenology, i highly recommend Zizek's The
Ticklish Subject....

so, my question is: how do you relate parasitism to the idea of the split
law, as an "inherent transgression" rather than as a by-product or
counter-discourse?  in other words, if you want to displace subject/object
relations, what is your approach to subjectivity?  and also, isn't society
itself the enigmatic signifier?

lastly, as far as sanctioning certain artists goes, yes, this is necessary
and inevitable - i completely agree.  but this function of what Bourdieu
calls consecration is also, i would argue, a fundamental fantasy that calls
for a critical response - conscientization.  here, if i have anything to say
about queer relational, it is that the discourse of the analyst can be of
some help.

marc
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