bumbling amateurs

Ryan Walters walter at rmi.net
Thu Apr 1 17:35:50 EST 1999


Sorry

Jim Taylor wrote:

> Charles:
> Please, for the sake and sanity of the List, put a sock in it.
> Jim Taylor
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Charles Gavette <timbukt2 at excite.com>
> To: <leps-l at lists.yale.edu>
> Sent: Wednesday, March 31, 1999 6:42 PM
> Subject: bumbling amateurs
>
> > 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.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________________
> > Get your free, private email at http://mail.excite.com/
> >


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