[lbo-talk] Differance

Dwayne Monroe idoru345 at yahoo.com
Thu Jul 1 08:30:50 PDT 2004


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.

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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.



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