bumbling amateurs

[Ryan Walters]

Will everyone get off the post-structuralist stuff. It is stale.  I know it
sounds cool to ride through france on a motercycle and tear down hierarchies,
spouting Walt Whitman at passing authority, but it is just stale.. A philosophic
troll.  Back. Back under your bridge there is no room for you in this ivory
tower.
Nietsche wrote something to the effect , He who is deep strives to clear the
waters while one who wishes to appear deep strives to obscure the waters.

Charles Gavette wrote:

> It is much easier to speak from within academia itself, whereby one has at
> least some priveledge via documentation. For an academic to speak of
> equality of the right to speak seems funny. Michel de Certeau has already
> written on the right to speak and I suggest it as part of a sane syllabus.
> The right to speak carries along with it, a scission: "We will let you go on
> national t.v., but you only have 15 minutes." This scission is by way of
> hierarchy and presupposition, whereby the credibility of the speaker is
> reinforced by a certificate of merit signed by the founding
> fathers(formulations that restore power to the signifier). This is the
> arborescent model (roots, off-shoots, branches) as opposed to the rhizome (a
> rhizome may be broken, shattered at any given spot, but it will start up
> again on one of its old lines, or on new lines). This is very different from
> the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order(The World Tree in
> mythology). The rhizome is perhaps a strange "mystification of science and a
> de-mystification of magic." A discourse all the more total for being
> fragmented, and free to form undocumented connections. It is not just
> another departure, it is a nomadic line of flight of thought, quite
> amateurish, happily proceeding with its empiricism. It makes maps, whereas
> the tree model is a logic of tracing and reproduction. The map has to do
> with performance, wheras the tracing always involves an alleged
> "competence." Thought itself is not arborescent, and the brain is not rooted
> or ramified matter. The brain is much more a grass than a tree. The leaps
> each message makes across the fissures in between neuronal axons makes the
> brain a multiplicity, a whole uncertain, probablistic system.
>   Opposed to the "centered" systems is one in which communication can run
> from any neighbor to the other, and does not need to be overcoded, never has
> available a supplementary dimension over and above its own number of lines,
> in other words, over and above the multiplicity of numbers attached to those
> lines. This is a plane of consistency. Can this tracing be put back onto the
> map? Even if it can, it is damn sure not a symmetrical operation. It is a
> more asymmetrical synthesis of the sensible. This is what makes the tracing
> so dangerous: the imitator always creates the model, and attracts it. So,
> the tracing even placed back onto a map will only succeed in transforming a
> rhizome(the amateur, the empiricist) back into some organized form, even
> when it thinks it is reproducing something new. It is only reproducing
> itself. It injects redundancies and propagates them. More point of
> structuration, making the prison exist not just as an institution anymore,
> but making the prison everywhere. The prison is now everywhere.
>  And maybe the weed leads the most satisfactory existence of all. No, this
> is whyacademia and the amateur cannot (and should not) integrate. This is
> why there will always be opposition to the arborescent prison model The
> rhizome is an antigenealogy. Rather than localisable linkages between points
> and positions, the rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest,
> capture, offshoots....a grass growing and greening from the middle.
>
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