[Dancecult-l] violence EDMC

[tobias c. van Veen]

Wow, I didn't know there were such well-informed scholars of Derrida hiding
out here. Yes, as Neil Huthnance has demonstrated -- with a lot of work and
time, thanks Neil -- the process of how deconstruction, methinks, isn't
caught up in advocating violence (a la Futurism or anything otherwise, and I
don't see it as historically or structurally "avant-garde") rather than
_recognizing states of violence already_ that are *unavoidable*. This is the
precarious nature of what Derrida calls the double-bind, which I will
summarize here as something *more* than "damned if you do, damned if you
don't," or the Catch-22, that is, it is something of a state of laughter
(jouissance, pleasure, play) as one realizes that to face the situation is
to grasp its impossibility, even absurdity, and that all life (and death) is
the path through exactly thus. Neil writes:

> Contrary then to Featherstone's argument, Derrida appears to foreground the
> significance of critical decelerations when he argues that the existence of
> absolute speed will have to be predicated upon the incorporation of a certain
> delay "that never allows itself to be captured" absolutely [...]

Yes, to cut to the chase, when speaking _in this context_ of speed,
deconstruction is very much a process of slowing down at times (différance
in French includes the incorporation of _deferral_). I think Neil hits it on
the head when he writes:

> It becomes a question thus of critically selecting within a given context a
> rhythm of speed and difference relative to the forces of control. Derrida
> appears somewhat pragmatic then when he concludes that "[w] e must, as in
> democracy, struggle from within the movement in progress, in order to inflect
> it differently" (Derrida 1998: 1; Corson 2000: 197).

Indeed. 

Ok, Neil posed a few comments concerning the 'alien':

> [Derrida's] argument is that capital continually disestablishes the category
> of the human, in which case it might need to be clarified whether Tobia's
> musings about becoming "alien" are symptom formations, or counter reactions
> to the process Derrida desribes. In any case, I think it might be helpful to
> talk about democratisation of "speed" in Derrida's sense as an attempt to
> slow the exchange rate [sic] between the economic and cultural spheres.
> Perhaps unlike Tobias, I think this makes questions of ontology secondary,
> and questions of cultural policy primary i.e. a democratisation of cultural
> policy might help slow the rate of imitation/translation between these two
> spheres.

Well, I guess they are "musings" but then we must be clear that these
musings are inspired by those who have come before me, AfroFuturist culture,
and writers Kodwo Eshun, Paul D. Miller, DJ/Rupture and others who have been
the muses proper in this case. It would be better to see me as refracting
their arguments a bit, and, to be careful not to confuse this elaboration or
exegesis with a position of my own...

That said, I'm not sure the becoming-alien can be broken down into the
binary here of counter-reactions or symptomatic formations, or why they
should be seen as antagonistic (or let us say dual: one or the other).
Deconstruction would push us to think them otherwise. Both, certainly, but
then this wouldn't be saying much, given that practically any cultural
formations is both symptom of the totality (which can never be contained) of
socio-cultural-economic-political forces and its counter-reaction. Analysing
the gap between the two would be the work required here, but I also think
that these two choices offered do not respond to the richness of
becoming-alien.

I'm also not sure I was going about in any privileging operation of
"ontology" over cultural policy (in fact are these two strata even in
discourse with each other? a gulf would seem to separate them). I'm also not
sure "becoming" falls under the sign of ontology. So let me be clear: it
would appear to me that becoming-alien would not so much be an "ontological"
operation as it would be an enacted performativity that crosses all spheres
of socio-economic-political realms. The conditions of (im)possibility for
this performativity need a heck of a lot of thinking about, and the books on
'Afro-Sonic Modernity', as Alex Weheliye puts it, are just starting to come
out. 

My hypothesis is thus: becoming-alien, its *play* on the alien -- a play
that Neil recognises too in the "techno" in this context of EDMC -- allows
us to infiltrate in-between, say, the identity operations of Marxist
phenomenology that devalues and sees as "alien" the processes of commodity
fetishism (and/also, as Lefebvre would put it, the technics of the machinic
object as alienating production) and the AfroFuturist practices, rhythms,
technologies, musics and (contra/sub)cultures that embrace, twist and play
(with) the alien. There's a lot of bracketing in this last sentence as
there's a LOT to think about here, namely quite a challenge to certain
fundamentals of leftist politics *as well as* philosophies that rely upon
the purity of the phenomenon (which is to say most of analytic philosophy,
phenomenology, I guess what Derrida calls "metaphysics").

An interesting way into this for Derrida fanatics might be to consider
Derrida's deconstruction of Marx's phenomenology in _Specters of Marx_ that
not only shifts ontology to hauntology (from the phenomenology of
presence/absence to hauntology of specters) but reveals a similar opening of
the alien. The alien is no longer that which *negatively* alienates,
distances us as pure subject from work or the pure object from its
fetishistic character. The alien precedes the subject and the object, and
its meaning is displaced from a negative process of "alienation" to one
which is incorporated as part of the process of becoming. "Alien" here can
be thought as an otherwise "other" though now displaced from Eurocentric
discourses of the "other" which deconstruction is prone to.

To address the question of violence. Here, the alien is liberated through a
certain *violence of reading* -- like any great philosopher's reading --
which deconstruction reveals as inherent to any kind of reading, but I think
reading violence here means reading liberation -- though again, the idea is
to think neither in positive/negative (good/evil) terms of morality,
judgement, value, and so on. We are talking about FORCE. So yes Graham the
unsettled question here is ethics. FORCE in the name of what. Ghandi exerted
FORCE or violence upon his body (fasting). His "nonviolence" falls under a
FORCE of inertia enacted upon the state (mass hunger fasts). "Nonviolent"
protesters today chain themselves to things and go limp: a violence is
enacted in their immobility. I would question, in a way, their adherence to
"nonviolence" as a _pure ideology_, though I fully grasp its tactical or
even strategic necessity, its value as a media discourse. But as for ethics,
Derrida spent his later life working through exactly this problematic: how
to read the affirmation of deconstruction as "ethical", ethical to what or
whom, and in what meaning of ethos / ethics.

Now, at least in this context, inserting AfroFuturism into the mix allows
the alien to take on a, as Neil says, pragmatic role when answering the
charge: "In the name of what does one perform such a reading, by claiming
that that which alienates us is a part of us? For isn't there obviously
alienated work and forces of appropriation?"

The response begins with: in the name of what has come already. In the name
of AfroFuturism. Of course it might be the case that a scholar such as
Adorno (whom otherwise I deeply respect) would critique AfroFuturism
outright. This is one possible response, but one that is deeply troubled
(let's sidestep such critique for a second). Let us say that if one doesn't
wish to negate an existing culture outright, one then has to *deal* with it
and *deal with* how it has *worked* for certain people, dammit. Just like
hip-hop's the Game -- how it has created an economic empire, form of
creative expression, political and social force, media empire, for the
afro-disapora where there was little -- it can't simply be written off as
"representing" or "furthering" mysogyny and violence.

And the question above can be thought in terms of technics or technology in
general: that it comes not from outside to overtake the human and render us
as slaves to the machine, but comes from us, is part of us to begin with.
And unlike Hegel it will and never can be re-synthesized properly; nor does
it merely belong to certain class interests (as if classes could contain the
dissemination of "alienating technics" today!). Which does not mean either
that passive acceptance of pro-technological discourse is the answer (i.e.
the California Ideology, Web 2.0, utopian technocracy in all its forms and
twists with late-capitalism), but rather, what is called for is an
attentiveness to a slightly more complicated form of infiltration and
intervention, a reappropriation of the technics -- ah, let us play or spin
here on the play of the Technics 1200, exappropriated for readjusting the
rhythms of music and moving bodies -- which is where one finds AfroFuturism.

Such an answer of 'what has already come to pass'  is the subtle
counterpoint to every enunciation that is more or less commonplace in
deconstruction, "in the name of what is to-come [à la à-venir]..." -- in the
name of the future, which of course is part of the gesture: for what
monstrous creations AfroFuturism has birthed --!!-- and from which we know
not what the future can bring.

beat down on the brain time,

    tobias



tobias c. van Veen -----------++++
http://www.quadrantcrossing.org --
McGill Communication & Philosophy