There is no irony in a constitutive lack: Standing together in absentia is no antagonism except between an ox and a moron, and that empty constitution can be a deadly simulacron whose hyper-reality is the schizophrenia of civilisation, depending as it does on eviscerating those who already have no stomach for it. If there is no center, there is no space for a master signifier – no deep structure, no operating system. Lack is (by definition) always an ex post facto destitution if not a positive refusal where the only absent presence is a void, not to be confused with a vacuum which is merely the flip side of gravity like suck and blow is to a straw. Antagonism (literally posited as the death instinct) is a stand against life such that arguments need no justification, being sufficient unto themselves like any proper fictional phantasm. It is not the antimagnetic repulsion or bounce of a back to back or belly to belly dance which may produce a gravitational spin and future entanglement which is also to say, if one is up on Poe, "electrifyingly shocking" and in no way lacking in possibility (see Pitter-patter & Pata Pata, where an exchange is never the intention nor an uncontested crossing of lines, and if that generation is antagonistic, where the fuck are the storks when we need them?).
"The imperative in Lacanian theory is to “accept” lack, whereas the logic of a non-mythical idea of contingency is to use opportunities for openness as a basis for creativity. The difference between mythical and non-mythical versions leads politically to the difference between acceptance of blockages and attempts to overcome them. Lacanian theories involve a strong commitment to slave morality, as exemplified by Laclau’s insistence that every chain of equivalence involve a unity against an external threat.
...Žižek’s “revolutionary” insistence on the need for masochistic selfdegradation,‘subjective destitution’ and identification with a Master and a Cause, not to mention his directly reactive insistence that self-awareness amounts to awareness of the negative, of death and trauma, prior to any active identification or articulation. This is a reterritorializing “contingency” which fits closely with the operation of capitalist ideology, where ‘under conditions we recognize as desperate, we are told to alter ourselves’, not the conditions,
...According to Deleuze, there are two models of contingency: the creative power of the poet, and the politician’s denial of difference so as to prolong an established order. It is for the latter that negation (lack) is primary, ‘as if it were necessary to pass through the misfortunes of rift and division in order to be able to say yes’. For the poet, on the other hand, difference is ‘light, aerial and affirmative’. ‘There is a false profundity in conflict, but underneath conflict, the play of differences’, differences which should be affirmed as positive and not overcoded by negativity
...‘Ours is no art of mutilation, but of excess, superabundance, amazement’, declares Hakim Bey. Though ‘truly fearful things’ exist in the world, they can perhaps be overcome - ‘on the condition that we build an aesthetic on the overcoming rather than the fear’ (1991, 37, 78). A constitutive “I-don’t-know”, if such a concept is thinkable, would involve precisely such a free play of differences, and not, to use Žižek’s term, the ‘good terror’ which ensures that this free play is brought to a halt."– A. Robinson
No comments:
Post a Comment