[Dancecult-l] violence

[tobias c. van Veen]

+ yes you are completely right Graham in pointing out that "the
appropriation of an other/ness seems critical to human development." Setting
aside the word "appropriation" -- for reasons I will go over below -- I
think Derrida (and me!) would agree that this is the point of reading how
discourses of _identity_ often argue against *exactly* this incorporation of
alterity. So what I mean is:

1. historically "identity" is privileged, us vs. them (we are white, better
than black, we are aristocratic, land-owners, phallus-born.. you get it:
this is pure identity, as nationalism, ethnocentrism, phallogocentrism).
Identity is PURE.

2. however as 21c denizens we all know that identity is IMPURE and it is
alterity -- the other! -- which makes us 'us'. but this is something of a
new thought, and still continues to be very contentious (heck, nationalism,
ethnocentrism, racism, theism and sexism are all very much with us today).

Now this isn't really a new thought which is where I turn again to
'appropriation', for here we get a bit of Hegel: doesn't Hegel theorise
exactly this process, of the self becoming self by projecting the alien and
then synthesizing it back into the self?

This is where 'appropriation' gets a bad rap, for I think what we want to
think is not a process of ASSIMILATING or INTROJECTING or APPROPRIATING, but
rather a process of INCORPORATING or EXAPPROPRIATING alterity. The former
can signify a willful appropriation of the other for the service and benefit
of myself. Here we find, for example, Said's analysis of Orientalism. Or
ethnotourism. You get the picture. But also on philosophical levels, here is
Hegel, and Marx to a degree too (see my other post in response to Neil,
which also responds to you Graham what I do no say here).

Now the latter -- incorporation / exappropriation -- these are developed in
Derrida to describe 1. what he believes is already going on but also 2.
strategies of resistance to appropriating alterity. Not only Derrida but
many 20thc writers and thinkers and mavericks develop this under different
terms but all signal the *necessity* of an alterity already inside me which
makes me 'me' but which I cannot appropriate for my 'self' (nor even, at its
'deepest' level, identify, for it disrupts and yet makes possible the logic
of identity: we are talking about the unconscious, the ghost, the spectral,
etc.). It goes like this: it disrupts the terrain of inside/outside, this
other beasty in me is me but yet not me (it is also very much related to if
not the structural outlines of language/cs/ucs). It is paradoxical and
vertiginous a-logic. Derrida draws here from Nicholas Abraham and Maria
Torok in psychonanalysis to develop incorporation NOT as a pathology as
psychoanalysis sees it but rather as the condition of im/possibility for
subjectivity. This is one level, getting to the core of things as it were.

The next level might be that of hospitality in D's discourse, opening to
alterity and negotiating the limits of hospitality on the general level and
then to the level of cultural policy, the nation-state, and so on. And then
there's Bhaba's 'hybridity' on this level, a kind of mimicry-incorporation
that turns the tables against the oppressor / colonizer through
incorporating colonising culture and reversing it and twisting it as a
resistance counter-attack. This too would be a kind of exappropriation for
strategic purposes, but not 'merely' conscious, for one has been *raised* in
the coloniser's culture. Such a strategy and the oppressor's culture is
*part of* oneself. Sampling in technoculture works at this level --
exappopriation of the media archives -- and can be used for all kinds of
strategies (such as to explicitly counter property law a la Negativland; but
also, is not every act of sampling an exappropriation of the general law of
the proper, of all purity, of all logics of pure appropriation that would
claim, "this is MINE, ME ALONE"? -- here we can connect technology to
technics, property law to general law, and the general thinking of the
proper to what is "proper" in various cultural contexts).

Thus overall what all such readings or strategies have in common is
understanding exappropriation or incorporation as always-already in process,
the complex agenesis of genesis, as basically fruitful stuff of living-on
(living, surviving and dying), and as nondialectical -- no synthesis back to
me where, like in Hegel's Phenomenology, I come to pure self-awareness at
the end of the dialectic, like Geist in world history -- though caught up in
repetition (speeds and rhythms, delays and deferrals, differences). And yah,
caught up in here is violence (or the recognition of the violences / forces
at work -- see other post).

this is waaaay too much for Sunday morning,

    tobias




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