[lbo-talk] Differance

[Dwayne Monroe]

Chuck Grimes wrote:

I think in order to perform this transformation toward
Differance requires a kind of multiple mode identity
where there is no `core' no simple, single, monolithic
`identity' as such. Somehow you must be able to be
multiple people, not as an act or as `passing', but as
the heart of the matter so to speak. Not many people
will understand what I am trying to describe, but if
you live in multiple worlds you manage to integrate
them in your mind simply as a consequence of living
them as modes of being---with a certain reserved frame
that finds and discovers homeomorphisms among
differences. This isn't the same as making people into
the same shape. Instead, it is finding certain
concordances between different shapes. The differences
are not lost in the process, they are explored so to
speak for the shake of discovered difference. What is
substituted for a fixed frame of reference with
universal clocks and rods, is something like the
Lorentz group---if anybody follows that. It has its
own coherence and operates perfectly well. However,
what is sacrificed is the privileged position of the
local frame.

===============



I've long believed this though seldom said it aloud
because I encounter resistance from both those in my
life who swing to the right (in defense of supposed
traditions) and those who lean towards the left -  the
"celebrate diversity" crowd who reify culture and
those who want me to be some kind of 'pure'-Black
person, luminous with the radiance of an imagined
spiritual essence in holy opposition to
Euro-materialism.

To give credit where it's due, I think Brian Dauth has
consistently been describing just this sort of
fluidity when he writes about the political benefits
of the Buddhist concept of no-permanent self (which
many folks routinely, perhaps willfully, misinterpret
and dismiss as being a doctrine of
non-self-existance).


But achieving comfort with the fact of multiple selves
and the multiplicities outside of oneself
(simlutaneously seperate, yet not...as gravitational
force forms a fabric binding matter and exerting
influence over distance) is, at this stage of our
development, too wiggy a concept (like M theory) to be
acceptable to most people and is difficult even for
folks who are convinced of its necessity to hold onto
for very long.


Without at least some social evolution along these
lines, it's difficult to imagine humanity maintaining
even a semblance of civilization for too many more
centuries.



.d.