[Dancecult-l] deconstruction, normativity, expressivity

[Nibelungentreue at aol.com]

Thanks to you folks who responded. Don't worry Adam and Natale, and anyone 
else who may be interested, notwithstanding minor differences, I think Tobias 
and myself are basically singing from the same song sheet, imploring you not to 
burn your precious Mike Ink and Peter Namlook collections in order to avoid an 
imminent "techno" dystopia! I know introducing deconstruction into these 
discussions may be too specialised, or, dare I say it, "abstract", for some 
tastes, so I'm conscious about not banging on about it for too long. Suffice it to 
add, if this is one post too many, I'll retreat before someone asks me to go 
tell it on the mountain, or for Tobias and myself "to get a room" (cue pained 
laughter from Tobias).

All jokes aside, there is another practical reason that extends, I think, 
beyond such concerns of having chosen the correct forum for raising in the first 
place the "inconvenient truth" of Derrida's texts. When I reference Tobias 
"musing" on certain issues, I do not choose this phrase with the intention of 
impugning the complexity of his thinking by deliberately contrasting it with my 
own style. No, I reference here how reflective the content of writing on a 
listserv is of the form in which it appears; hyper aphoristic concentrations will 
tend to dominate because this form of writing is not like composing a 
scholarly essay or writing a book. This qualification has to be borne in mind, as 
folks are simply using this forum to "try out" some ideas, rather than presenting 
fully developed material. I think there might be a specific lesson for you 
here Adam, and maybe Natale as well; it's probably not a good idea to see Tobias 
and myself as referencing the "countersignature" of "Derrida" as some kind of 
final authority on "deconstruction". Such an attempt literally makes no sense 
at all from a strictly deconstructive point of view. Again, given the 
restrictions of the forum, citing this "author" should only be understood as a 
shorthand term for the sake of convenience. And maybe that’s really where the 
confusions lie: People like Paul De Man and Jonathan Culler, who did the most to turn 
deconstruction into a ‘method’ force-fed it to smart Ivy League graduate 
students. They came to believe that Derrida was proposing some kind of 
counter-intuitive deep reading technique, whereas Derrida’s own line always seemed 
anti-methodological much more like the later Wittgenstein, i.e. deconstruction is ‘
always already’ happening in the circulation of texts, whether you realise it 
or not. Texts ultimately deconstruct themselves, though we might try to become 
attentive to this fact and disabuse ourselves of certain presuppositions 
about the constancy of meaning, etc.

For the sake less of uncharitable schoolmasterly pedantry, and more the need 
to remain consistent with the aforementioned kind of philosophical rigour 
demanded of a deconstructive reading, Tobias, I would question/qualify whether it 
is a matter for you to claim that certain ideas are not really your own, and 
that you are "merely" giving them a bit of your own inflection. WIth repetition 
comes difference anyway, not least in your grafting of these citations into a 
new context, irrespective of whether the new context is putatively discussing 
the same topic as in its point of "origin" (i.e. Afro Futurism). At least as 
I understand it, remaining mindful of these conditions is the starting point 
for any discussion of ethics and deconstruction i.e. infinite responsibility 
towards self/other cannot be easily translated into the terms of "it was the 
other guy who really said it/did it".

With some of that much needed initial clarification out of the way, I'll now 
try to steer the discussion back towards the specifics of this thread. When I 
reference "ontology", it is partly with tongue planted firmly in cheek, 
inasmuch as I'm pretty cynical about the attempts by thinkers heavily influenced by 
postmodernism and poststructuralism to identify some kind of entity, whether 
they choose to refer to it in terms of "becomings" or not, as offering the 
promise of salvation from our sociohistorical condition. Perhaps surprisingly to 
some, this appears to happen sometimes with folks influenced by deconstruction. 
Take Donna Haraway's cyborg metaphor for example. For where Haraway is 
obviously sympathetic to deconstruction, putting forward the cyborg metaphor as a 
way out of the dualisms that have shaped our ontology (Haraway 1991: 181), 
Derrida, for example, regards metaphor instead as securing the privileged 
relationship between the human and Being; "Man alone takes pleasure in imitating…man 
alone learns by imitation" (Derrida 1982: 237).  As Yi acutely observes, the 
consequences of Derrida's reasoning for Haraway's cyborg are that:

…the more slavishly the cyborg imitates humans, the more seriously it affects 
human ontology. But in doing so, it also helps keep the metaphoric 
relationship with humans, thus rendering human ontology inexhaustible and a cyborg 
ontology impossible (Yi 2004).

So I guess the larger questions I was hinting at, Tobias, relate not so much 
to a demand to clarify your references to becoming "alien", along the lines of 
how would it specifically situate itself in relation to cyborgs (and in my 
experience, the cyborg metaphor is very popular in EDMC; how many djs or 
producers refer to themselves in such terms? Beyond this observation: why???). 
Afterall, you appear to run a clean line on the alien which avoids obvious 
metaphorical dependency. When I situate ontology, or even becomings if preferred, in 
relation to cultural policy, I am implicitly disputing your claim though that 
deconstruction is somehow apriori prevented from any such mutual contagion. 
Afterall, Derrida was known to have pronounced that there were "no exceptions" to 
where deconstruction would be at work. What might be suggested then is that 
the alien is drawn to a relationship to the constitutive antagonism that Derrida 
has described in the following terms:

"All that a deconstructive point of view tries to show, is that since 
convention, institutions and consensus are stabilizations (sometimes stabilizations 
of great duration, sometimes micro-stabilizations), this means that they are 
stabilizations of something essentially unstable and chaotic" (Derrida 1996: 
84).

In the context of my discussion of democratisation, the implication would be 
that this instability is something prior to conceptualisation; we could call 
it "the political", on the understanding that it cannot be conflated with 
"politics". What happens in a democracy, so the deconstructionist argues, is that 
this principle is instituted in society i.e. it is not created by democracy, it 
simply assumes an institutional form, albeit a retroactive attribution of 
something that cannot be directly "experienced". Were space permitting, an 
interesting discussion might be developed here, wherein this institutionalised form 
of stability/instability could be compared and contrasted with the writing in 
German philosophical anthropology on mimesis (read: imitation), say Plessner 
or Gehlen for example. As I recall, their argument was basically that social 
relations were facilitated by institution building, in the sense that 
routinisation etc released humans from the chaotic state they associated with Nature. In 
case Graham doesn't already know, this meant, for Gehlen et al, a reduction 
of primordial violence. Working in a separate space and time, American 
pragmatists such as G.H. Mead extended this principle to their thinking of political 
agency; the self was divided between an "I", an unstable agglomeration of 
spontaneous impulses, and a "me", that imitated the reciprocity/stability involved 
in social roles/institution building (co-operation was necessary sometimes or 
nothing could ever get done, no action would be coordinated). 

The implication of the pragmatist position is that expressivity and 
normativity need to be viewed as mutually giving birth to each other (as also for one 
of Canada's great modern philosophers, Charles Taylor; in an Australian 
context, it is worth reading the superb Clifford Hooker for comparable insights). 
However, this is a position that seemingly could not be countenanced by the likes 
of Deleuze and Guattari, as they explicitly claimed that the self should 
become all "I" and no "me". The question for deconstruction, and those who wish to 
use it in any kind of ethical sense, is how it can facilitate a "creative 
democracy"; i.e. how do you adjudicate/mediate the traffic between the "I" and 
the "me", or, if you prefer, between ethics and morality, the good and the 
right? I don't claim to know offhand if the "alien" is up to this task, but I have 
already expressed elsewhere my reservations about some of Derrida's own 
prescriptions in the text endorsed by Tobias, "Specters of Marx" (just in case 
anyone wants to press me on this detail, you'd have to first google "Huthnance 
Neil" and find the reference in my pdf format searchable thesis). That is to say, 
in the case of the alien , I don't know if this would be a necessary 
consequence of it potentially sharing too much emphasis/family resemblance with Torok 
and or/Max Stirner. I do know though that on occassion Derrida referred to 
himself as a "pragmatologist".

In other words, the important question, at base, has to do with the 
relationship between what I have already called "the political", and something else 
called "politics". Here then is the criteria by which a more recognisably 
mainstream understanding of "politics" would attempt to define itself against the 
deconstructive understanding of "the political" that I've described [above]:

1. Deconstructive emphasis on structural necessity implies the impossibility 
of society, because society can never be "present" to itself; this makes it 
difficult to identify social problems which require collective solutions i.e. 
deconstruction is anti-utopian
2. This opens up a power vacuum which will be filled by other ideologies and 
discourses.

My articulation of deconstruction's basic condition, mirthfully referred to 
as "ontology" by me, its structural necessity, to cultural 
policy/democratisation, is designed to overcome such objections. I agree with deconstructionists 
of all stripes that "the political" can perform a very important function in 
preventing the realisation of nightmare "utopias", such as totalitarianism. The 
status of a deconstruction encounter with this structural condition is 
ethical. If this unity is objectionable, it is equally the case that the same might 
be said of particularism because it attempts to articulate a unity and unity is 
thought of as synonymous with totalitarianism. By bringing deconstruction in 
line with cultural policy, I am suggesting a third possibility; ok, it may be 
the case that the coexistence of these opposite tendencies is coextensive with 
the constitution of the social as such, thereby the ambiguity on which 
democracy is based is irreducible, so democracy provides the best possibility for a 
mediation between the two. By bringing cultural policy to the deconstructive 
table, one can consider the operationalisation of this mediation in a very 
specific sense, thereby articulating "the political" and "politics"; we have to 
learn to make our expectations more definite, whilst leaving them open for 
further rearticulation. The Welsh cultural critic Raymond Williams has some 
wonderful lines that gesture at these necessarily conjoined imperatives:

"Never yet, in the great pattern of inheritance and response, have two wholly 
identical individuals been formed. This, rather than any particular image of 
virtue, is our actual human scale. The idea of a common culture brings 
together, in a particular form of social relationship, at once the idea of natural 
growth and that of its tending. The former alone is a type of romantic 
individualism; the latter alone a type of authoritarian training. Yet each, within a 
whole view, marks a necessary emphasis. The struggle for democracy is a struggle 
for the recognition of equality of being, or it is nothing. Yet only in the 
acknowledgement of human individuality and variation can the reality of common 
government be comprised" (Williams: Culture and Society 1780-1950, 1958 
[1961]: 323).

This impression might be further magnified by bringing up the work of Mouffe 
and Laclau, except for the fact that I'm starting to run out of steam. I don't 
know if I'll be able to post again for a while. Wouldn't mind asking Tobias 
for some advice on another distantly related theoretical issue I'm currently 
working on, if he were agreeable (i.e. mightn't be a need to clog up this 
listserv with it). For anyone else who may have read this far, I hope this has 
answered some of your questions about where I stand on deconstruction and possible 
implications with relation to Adam's original provocative question. Feel free 
to contact me about your work or my stuff.

cheers,

Neil Huthnance
   
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