Chuck Grimes wrote:
>
>I am not sure how to approach this aspect of racism, but it is the
>most pernicious mode of all, built into the fabric of thought, law,
>institutional and bureaucratic procedures, performed as civic and
>social habit and almost invisible to all those people not effected by
>it----thankfully a group which is slowly moving from a majority to a
>minority.
>
If it's an aspect of racism, it's an aspect of all forms of
identification with one or another form of power.l..and in
its deepest sense our identification with the ndividual ego/mental process.
>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.
>
Isn't that what we most deeply mean when we talk about "consciousness."
Do we not exactly mean that it
is a state that is experienced by an individual, but that it is
effectively the experience of the illusion of individuality;
that it is an experience of the interpenetration of all beings and modes
of seeing; of our participation and inclusion
in a "whole" that is not in any way privileged?
>At its deepest level it is precisely what Strauss and others have
>thought was the worst threat of `modernity' and in their retrograde
>way how the US whitewing think and why they have appropriated people
>like Strauss as their mentors. But there are differences between the
>old relativity the `modernity' project and the new one, say the
>post-modernity project that I am thinking about. For one thing,
>differance remains more or less intact. There may be no need for a
>systematic equivalence between frames in quite the rigorous way that a
>mathematical metaphor demands. Differance is unerasable,
>non-equivalent in any context so the institutional mode must change
>from its monolithic presumptions of equivalence into a kind of loosely
>defined inclusion under a non-terminating negotiation---something like
>the process of solving a continued fraction. There is no teleos, no
>end product, no end point, no terminus, no resolution. It is more of a
>method or process than an architecture of forms. There is no single
>value that can obtained in the limit.
>
I think you're giving Strauss too much credit. He and his ilk are not
afraid of the pregnant void. They are
uncomfortable with the empty void of late capitalism and they want to
fill it with some hierarchy that
comforts them in the thought that power and privilege are justified by
some kind of natural/transcendent order.;
Joanna