Warning: have just been reading Derrida
On Fri, 2009-08-28 at 08:17 -0600, Douglas Barbour wrote:
> Nah, most of Gibson's books are out in paperback. I'd also look at his
> most recent two, Pattern Recognition & Spook Country,
I was also thinking Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet,
(about $50, here.) Although I know the theory it would be a good book to
have in my growing library collection; as becomes a museum's ruins.
Dominic said something interesting (re: Larkin?) that 1960s gender
relations cannot be accessed today with the same exchange of women. This
is another aspect that links to code and the exchange of women.
While it is possible to connect computer code, such as C source code, to
the exchange of women idea developed by socialist feminists, this is at
a metaphysical level. Dominic points also to a foreclosure between
generations which is essential, I would think, to act against an
exchange of women as equivalence which is trans-historical and outside
of history.
It becomes then the movement of a birth and continuous presence; that is
adventure. Foreclosure then takes on an active and dynamic meaning. None
of the determined predicates can be applied clearly in opposition to
another or as any state and yet continues between as a passage. States
of affairs then must appeal to the fundamental opposition of continuity
and discontinuity. [Derrida, OF, pp262-3]
This is the problem of Hegel's metaphysics and a way out needs to be
found, if life is to continue. The only way this can be written, as I
see it, is to use the conventions of prose novels, or in perhaps more
precise terms, Ficto-criticism. But hopefully this can be a more popular
style, even if it stages a dialog between Hegel and Schelling at the
bequest of the devil with young male students as the audience; being
initiated into the rites of passage of manhood. Flight into abstraction
becomes reversed here as being a flight away from abstraction toward
familiar figures. (Again, foreclosure.)
So it seems, Ficto-criticism lays out a ground of immanent critique and
at this stage I seem to step from the closet of a novel into
ficto-criticism, which to me is the only writing worth the effort. (I
plead being too old for new tricks. A feminist friend suggested I look
to Derrida as a way out of Hegel, also.)
The little deconstruction I did do with Microsoft Vista indicated that
at the user interface the user is inducted into a secret which bonds the
user to the interface. I found this a useful trope to pick up. It
repeats itself also at the level of source code, like C, a computer
programming language. While C is reliant on the innate logic of silicon
it also finds a way into this story, so to speak. Following Sedwick's
deconstruction, C code can be the exchange of women. The temptation to
break this link appeals to the judgement of continuity and discontinuity
as oppositions which can never be resolved, thereby dragging computer
science into the realm of theology. Let god decide... Gibson, I like
this.
Anyways, I can see how this could play out rather nicely in fictional
form, which happens outside.
There is a quote below from Eagleton which seems to cover most of the
idea of the exchange of women.
The ideology of romantic love, while masking the economic basis of
bourgeois marriage in this period [19th century] as the exchange of
women, shows by its persistence that it exists autonomously, independent
of its specific economic functions in a given historical conjuncture.
From:
Marxist literary theory: a reader
By Terry Eagleton, Drew Milne
page 330
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