[-empyre-] some thoughts on complicity

[virginia solomon]

I do believe that precisely the intervention that Johanna makes, or at least
how her work proves useful for me, is that she points to and problematizes
precisely this founding assumption of metaphysics. It's one of those a
priori assumptions that is performative precisely because it covers up its
very construction, and thereby the ideological purpose that it serves. The
challenge is to come up with other frameworks that acknowledge the
impossibility of opting out without succumbing to Frankfurt School doom and
gloom, yes?

On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 6:04 PM, Gregory Ulmer <glue at ufl.edu> wrote:

> Johanna Drucker wrote:
> > I just don't want anyone to be excused from it.... I mean, it's like
> > not an opt-out category....
> >
> Right, but the desire to opt-out, and the intuition that one ought to
> disown complicity, is inherent in almost every metaphysics (the wisdom
> traditions of every civilization, every apparatus expresses a feeling of
> distaste for the world of experience, of embodiment itself).  Plato's
> account of metempsychosis, his dualist ontology sublated into
> Christianity is familiar.  This feeling achieved its clearest statement
> in Western philosophy in Descartes (as I don't have to tell you):  the
> cogito.  It is the fundamental philosophical problem of transcendence:
> what is the relation of humans with the natural world?  There is none,
> Descartes was understood to have said.   That is, Human Being is outside
> of, and dominant over, material nature.  Modern philosophy has attempted
> to refute that account, but the worldview persists in our contemporary
> conduct.  Deleuze&Guattari's insistence on "immanence," and Deleuze's
> admiration for Spinoza as "prince of philosophers," is due to the
> latter's equation of God with Nature (Deus sive Natura).  The model of
> being as "complicity" (as tainted) proposes that life is best lived as a
> quick roundtrip (the quicker the better):  the best is never to have
> been born; and second-best is  to die soon.  Modern, secularized
> concerns about complicity retain an aura of these transcendental systems
> (Sufi poet Rumi:  life is a tavern, and I am waiting to go home with the
> one who brought me).
>   Apologies for the shorthand.
> To place "complicity" in this context clarifies to some extent why
> ecology as politics and ethics meets so much resistance in practice:  to
> think ecologically requires admission of complicity.  The motto of the
> EmerAgency is "problems B us."
>
> thanks for this conversation.
> Greg Ulmer
> > Johanna
> >
> > On Jan 8, 2010, at 11:38 AM, Gerry Coulter wrote:
> >
> >
> >> Given the current state of the globalizing system of promotion --
> >> no, I dont think complicit can be thought of without carrying a
> >> perjorative connotation. It is precisley the perjorative connations
> >> enveloping complicity that have made this discussion so interesting
> >> so far ... especially inasmuch as they have been avoided
> >>
> >> you wish to avoid binaries but speak of original sin?
> >>
> >> hmmmmm
> >>
> >> ________________________________________
> >> From: empyre-bounces at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-
> >> bounces at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Johanna Drucker
> >> [drucker at gseis.ucla.edu]
> >> Sent: January 8, 2010 1:04 PM
> >> To: soft_skinned_space
> >> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] some thoughts on complicity
> >>
> >> I wonder if it is possible to keep complicit from carrying a
> >> pejorative connotation? I meant for it to be a description, not a
> >> judgment, that exposes the inevitable condition of participation in
> >> cultural conditions as the place from which we each think, work,
> >> write, live. I'm not a religious person, but in a way, this is
> >> equivalent to acknowledging a form of original sin in cultural terms
> >> -- that we are all always part of the conditions we survey. Does that
> >> make sense? I'm trying to avoid binarisms that might spring up by
> >> putting complicit on one side of a value judgement, that's all.
> >>
> >> Johanna
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> empyre forum
> >> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> >> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> empyre forum
> >> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> >> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> >>
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > empyre forum
> > empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> > http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> >
>
>
> --
> *Gregory L. Ulmer*
> http://www.english.ufl.edu/~glue <http://www.english.ufl.edu/%7Eglue>
> http://heuretics.wordpress.com
>  University of Florida
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>



-- 
Virginia Solomon
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20100108/edf61b62/attachment.html