To JMC n ilk

My profound n sincere sympathies and warm May Day greetings!

Chandrika Ghosh




"Historiography not history!": Show me your difference. Show me your
legitimate
history, and I will show you histiography. What are your grounds for
legitimization?

CG writes, "As widely informed a person as JMC is surely unlikely to have
kept
himself aloof from the great ideological shifts that much of cultural,
philosophical and political history-writing has witnessed since the
monumental
representations from the Third Reich."

Great ideological shifts, Bat Girl! Did I forget to tune in when I tuned
out!

I did not know I had a personhood on this list. Claims as to my personhood
are
confusing since I have not claimed to be anything other than a maker of
arguments. Perhaps you have found my FBI file and can identify me. Here's my
fingerprint _____________. Where there is only politics one must be
accordingly.

Perhaps Eugene Ionesco had it right in _The Rhinoceroses_! You must
politicize
me then. Conscecrate my being with a label. Pin something on me and make it
stick. Imagine then that I am no more than a slave to your label, to your
name-calling, to your need for difference. Make obscure references to
Randall
Jarrell's "The Death of a Ball Turret Gunner" or imagine that I am in
witness
protection. Try to touch me and I liquify. No matter. What's in an email?
Hath
not an avator eyes?

Imagine that you C . . .  G . . .  are an avatar. Perhaps the avator of one
person. Perhaps a corporate avatar. To that end,  several avatars on this
list
remind me of each other. Perhaps JMC is an avator. Perhaps JMC is the slave
of
not only AN, BV, EON, EW, CG, DPS, DS, DS, GW, JC, MC, MF, MR, NW, PP, RR,
SB,
SJ, VD, and every other avator on this list. What's to keep JMC as anything
more
than a fiction? Why would JMC need to be otherwise on a film-philosophy
discussion list? Perhaps you CG are an avator savior, but how do you save a
fiction?

CG writes, "Epistemology and hermeneutics are increasingly being used as
markers
of simultaneity and coexistence by historiographers of fundamentalist
persuasions - cutting freely across Christianity, Hinduism, Islam or
Judaism.
What are all these, low-intensity but lethal nevertheless, wars all about?"

Power. That's pretty fundamental isn't it? I see your concern, but what's
your
argument? Perhaps you are looking for something authentic that you can use
to
counter a politics you find pernicious, but what if there is nothing but
power:
you against them? What then? What makes your claims better than those of the
fundamentalists? Are you any less power-hungry than your enemy?

CG, or Edmund Burke, writes, "Why are so many ancient structures being
brought
down?"

What, the French Revolution all over again? Does Nietzsche declare God dead
again near the end of that century and announce the eternal return of the
same?
Do we re-name the months of the year and start the calendar over? To what
"ancient structures" do you refer? Perhaps you like the sound of Thomas
Hardy.

CG states, "In speaking about films like "The Patriot", you are in fact not
speaking about history at all. You are merely talking about ideological
effects
as Minnie Randhawa has so clearly indicated in her last posting.
History and historical masquerades and mimicries must not be confused as I
am
afraid you seem to be doing."

Where do historical masquerades take place--on the Island of False History?
Do
special operations units whose sole purpose is to stage troop movements
exist in
the sphere of history or in the sphere of historical masquerades?

Yes, I have confused history and historical masquerades because--outside the
appartus that you invoke, and I certainly do not think that your winnowing
machine works--there is no separation. Charlton Heston parted the Red Sea,
got
the Ten Commandents directly from God, changed his garb to talk about the
NRA,
and then showed up as an astronaut on _The Planet of the Apes_.  Did
Nathaniel
West fail to articulate this idea in _The Day of the Locusts_ or Poe in "The
Masque of the Red Death"?

CG, your listing of films is intriguing. I would hope that you put your
arguments to more explanatory use. The argument in the following is scant,
but
looks exciting:

"A more resonant way to address the historical drives both metaphorically
and
metonymically would be, for
instance, Tarkovsky's use of documentary footage from the Spanish Civil war,
skirmishes at the Sino-Soviet border, second world war etc interwoven into a
narrative of crumbling relationship between a man and a woman in Mirror."

On the term "quasi-moral binaries": do you mean this term in the
astronomical
sense: quasars, pulsars, black holes, red giants, white dwarfs, and
quasi-moral
binaries? or do you position yourself in Deluezean garb and play at the
relationship between the molar and molcular? I am unsure of your coinage.

JMC
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