Thanks, Chris, for this most thoughtful and interesting post, in which I could follow your queer abstract machine, as well as the evolution of it in your own thought. Thanks for posting,

Rebecca

Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com
-------Original Message-------
From: Chris Jones <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 05/12/03 03:56 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: inside/outside

>
> More inside outside: more queer aesthetics.

The earlier analysis of domestic space in terms of an inside/outside
distinction is, of course, a deconstruction of western domestic space.
The key reference would be Derrida, _Glas_, also references to Maurice
Blanchot, the outside which is inside and Kierkegaard's doubt in the
preface to _Either/Or_, all of which move toward expressing a break with
Hegel's representational dialectics, beginning with Hegel's logic; the
outward is the inward, the inward the outward.

Dominic is posing some interesting questions, or questions in which I am
interested in terms of postmodernist thought. I describe postmodernism
as folding back onto the Romantic line of transcendental idealism
passing through Hegel, Schelling and onto Kant. The question is: does
representation produce reality? If the question is thought out in terms
of mainstream media representations, representation in this sense is a
redundancy and so not a question. But there is another way to follow the
question. it could be suggested the shattered mirror Dominic referred to
earlier shatters at the moment of maximum intensity which Dominic dates
as the Thatcher era in Britain. This is interesting, as I date the
plateau as 1984 - HIV/AIDS. I found Lawrence's comment also rather
brilliant as it poses again another question or problem for postmodern
thought, that of the elision of the particular into the universal, which
again refers to Hegel's dialectical unity of the particular and
universal and again refers back to the question: does representation
produce reality? Again, referring postmodernism to a folding back onto
transcendental idealism.

This leads on to an economics of representation. (Lyotard, Discourse
figure and Libidinal Economy could be referred to here.) Representation
also works as an economy in Derrida which suggests the metaphoricity of
economics and further suggests a never ending deconstructive procedure.
It is at this point that an evil can be located in Derrida's thought in
so far as the never ending deconstruction itself folds back onto
Hegelianism and transcendental idealism as Kantian notions of
representation as a synthesis of disjunctive series under unity. A weak
and reactive thought is then able to be diagnosed as resentiment and bad
conscience. In terms of a durational reading there is no outside of the
text, Derrida does not dispute that. What  is obliged by Derrida is an
inversion of economic as metaphor by the reader to metaphor as economic.
The brilliance of Lawrence's move, also, where representation is seen as
an economic relation in terms of the local and global, as well. It
refers the reader to Nietzsche _Beyond Good and Evil_: To recognize
untruth as a condition of life: that, to be sure, means to resist
customary value sentiments in a dangerous fashion; and a philosophy
which ventures to do so places itself, by that act alone, beyond good
and evil. In Derrida, representation as a Kantian metaphysics is able to
be diagnosed as evil.

The other interesting inversion Derrida makes available is his mistrust
of mysticism, expressed as a mistrust of Hegel's Absolute history, again
diagnosed as evil, as reactive forces, resentiment and bad conscience.
The mystic can then be inverted in the exclusive disjunction between
nature and culture where it is located with culture and history in Hegel
to a mysticism of Spinoza's God, in _The Ethics_, an immanent plane of
composition or that which Hume goes on to read as Nature. Alison's very
interesting comment about the landscape as the edge of mysticism
connects with English empiricism, here. (This could lead onto a much
longer discussion... but I did find the connection, the nomadic rhizome,
if you like, interesting and this may lead more toward my divergent
queer landscape line.) The other question that also starts to arise,
with Dominic, Lawrence and my reading of  Alison's comments on the
Australian landscape is the logic of deconstructive mimesis which has me
wanting to go back and re-read the teasing out of this logic by Paul
Taylor and Paul Floss in _Art and Text_ in the 1980s. (That requires a
visit to a research library in Sydney, since I no longer have my copies
with me.)

Derrida is posing an either/or question, not with Kierkegaard's
conceptual personae of the fiance but with his own conceptual personae
of textuality. Either to accept the weak reactive forces and poor
thought laid out by a never ending Hegelian-deconstruction of differance
or to break the Artistotlian hylomorphic logic of the text with noble
and strong active forces. This is Derrida's ideal game indicated with
his laying out of language as a false problem in _Of Grammatology_. My
invented queer abstract machine:

homo=homogeneity=sameness=(absolute)entropy=difference(in-itself)
(The multiple which is one.)

...breaks Hegelian-deconstructive logic in a line of text. That too is
an ideal game. The ideal game, which Deleuze credits Nietzsche for
discovering. There is no opposition of a minor game to a major game, nor
a divine game to a human game, both which demands winners and losers.
This would not be enough and other principles need to be imagined by
which the game would become pure. 1) There are no pre-existing rules.
Each move invents its own rules; it bears upon its own rule. 2. Far from
dividing chance and apportioning chance in a really distinct number of
throws, all throws affirm chance in and endlessly ramify it with each
throw. 3) the throws therefore are not really or numerically distinct.
They are qualitatively distinct, but are the qualitative forms of a
single cast which is ontologically one. It forms a nomadic distribution
for all times, not just a durational time of reading. Such a game if
applied to reality, to oppositional political movements, for example,
would produce nothing. Used in art and thought it produces art and
thought. A game with neither winners or losers, without rules, without
responsibility, a game of innocence in which skill and chance are no
longer distinguishable. The unconscious of real thought. Each thought
emits a distribution of singularities forming a series.
(from: Deleuze, _Logic of Sense_ pp 59-60)

Anyways, I promised a while ago some more on my queer abstract machine,
when I got around to writing it up. This is only a short outline sketch,
much of the logical argument is still missing, but it does work.

best wishes

Chris Jones.
>