From: n2412@cray.com (Joe Green)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: Re: The Business of Poetry
Date: 10 Apr 92 18:15:35 GMT
Organization: Cray Research, Inc.

In article <22529@alice.att.com> rhh@alice.att.com (r hardin) writes:
>
>
>>Vile because it helps reproduce the banality of a culture that wastes lives
>>to reproduce itself.  Vile becasue it is of a piece with the metaphors that
>>sustain that culture.  Vile because it is itself an act that smugly sublates
>>real bodies in the service of that which caused these real bodies to
>>be slaughtered.
>
>Well if it's the vileness of banality, why isn't just that the stereotypical
>adolescent invented by Romanticism, wanting to be an adult, choosing to
>be an adult, but too pure, too beautiful, too sensitive, and too lovely
>to do so?  As I am arguing somewhere else with little success.
>
>You can argue that the American adult puts away the wrong childish things,
>and I'd agree.
>
No -- that is not what I mean.  The emphasis is on the culture that
wastes lives to reproduce itself.  You seem to think that by banality
I mean the fallen world and seem to say that the acceptance of the
fallen world is the act of an adult.  My point is that the world IS
seen as fallen but that no-one accepts it as it is.  Fallen implies
a world that is not -- specifically a world without death.  It is this 
world that is believed in.  One of the metaphors that sustains this
culture is the metaphor of the apocalypse.  Simply put, the world
must be destroyed in order to save it.  Other bodies are put to
death to make our own body immortal.  I can show this in action
and can show it again and again in literature.

Again I mention Rene Girard's Violence and Sacrifice.

Another banality is the banality imposed by the commodification
of everything (including language).  This banality is a consequence
of capitalism.  Adorno.  Gramsci. Marx.  The metaphor of the commodity
is of a piece with the metaphor of apocalypse which is of a piece
with the process of the Hegelian dialectic, which is of a piece
with metaphors and myths imposed by patriarchy.

We have inherited the values of a priestly and aristocratic
culture bent on conquest, this culture modified and made more
powerful by capitalism.  Adults in this culture are dominated
by the ideologies necessary to reproduce this culture.  If
an adult is someone who struggles to be free, then an adult
is not a person who accepts these dominations.  The struggle
against these dominations is not a "romantic" struggle in
which a pure and deathless world is imagined -- it is
a struggle against the nostalgia that imagines a world like this
and sacrifices other bodies to achieve it for itself.

>If it's the vileness of a semiotic chain ending in Vietnam, why is it
>different from the guy who wouldn't get on an airplane because Newark NJ
>airport dropped three airliners on him in 3 months? 

You lost me here.


>
>And ``real bodies to be slaughtered'' was put to a use here, did you notice?

Of course -- as I've said again and again appropriation seems impossible
to avoid.  Self-reflexivity makes a difference becasue the gesture
points to the dominations imposed even on the speaker.  And the
use matters -- my usage works against the culture.  It is an act of
resistance, the act itself still in chains.


>
>Stanley Cavell:  ``In the midst of my pain maybe my metaphysical
>   scruples are dampened sufficiently to allow me to accept
>   another's sympathy even when, later,  I seriously doubt that
>   he really knew how much my shoulder hurt.  The very analogy
>   he used for it - comparing my pain with the time that he was
>   hit with a baseball - shows he cannot have really appreciated
>   the piercing quality of mine.''
>
>He is showing something about the grammar of pain and the grammar
>of sympathy.
>
>Or if I take my pain to a doctor and get no sympathy at all, if he takes
>a professonal interest, perhaps I learn a new attitude towards my
>pain from that, I find I can bear it.
>
>It it the old philosophical problem of knowing other minds, the fantasy
>of inexpressiveness, that you're fighting?  Are those _quite_ the right
>screams?

No -- in fact, framing the "problem" the way you do foregrounds certain
metaphysical scruples that can be endlessly discussed while the body
of the other is being tortured.  What needs to be foregrounded is
the fact of anothers pain -- this is simply an act of intution and
is simply what we do all the time when we try to help someone who is
hurt.  It seems pointless for one person in the slaughterhouse to
be paralyzed with these scruples.  Get out of the slaughterhouse
first and then sit down and talk about this.

I am not fantasizing inexpressiveness.  There are millions of
people who are not permitted to speak.  Any language they might
have has been taken from them by their masters.  Your grammar
of pain stuff is what you can chat about in the cruise ship
lounge.   Your dark-skinned waiter doesn't want to listen to these
marvelous chats.   



>
>A doubt that usually doesn't come up.
>
>You can't take the words from the criteria that make them function,
>you can't save the world.
>
>The world, unsaved, will make claims on me, including claims that
>I am not up to, that I cannot bear.  Then I cast the other out.
>I am no longer willing to restate what has been ill expressed, I
>harden my position.  That's as far as I can go.  And then I know.
>Then I have something I am not willing to acknowledge.  I may darken
>myself, become unknowable.

Seems like the cant of phenomenology to me.  Better not to think of the
world in terms like saved and unsaved and avoid being dominated by
the old theology.  This seems to me just a restatement of the old theology
-- the same longings still there.


>
>You can of course try to put terms out of commission, as I thought I
>had done with ``gesture.''

No, more magicians born everyday.
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