Re: AUT: RE: antiwar movement

["Nate Holdren" <nateholdren@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello again Peter,

Thanks for this. Good fun and productive, at least for me. I tend to agree
with the conclusions you draw and examples you give but I'm not sure I
follow or agree with the more ... umm... philosophical? high-falutin'?
moments. I especially like your view of vocabularies (I like that term
better than 'languages' but I think we mean the same thing) as tools to be
built and wrecked as needed.

It'd help me if you could just expand on what you mean by incommunicability,
and where you get the term from (what books or writers). Part of the problem
I keep having here - similar to a problem I have with Hegelian marxist
arguments - is that I sometimes get confused as to whether the argument is
about politics or the philosophy of mind/language. I do have certain views
about the latter (and the former!) - I think that for various reasons Hegel
and Saussure break down because they lead to conclusions which are at odds
with what I think are better accounts of consciousness and linguistic
activity. I also am deeply skeptical as to if there is any political
ramification to this (if Schelling outdoes Hegel, Grice and Davidson and
Quine outdo Saussure, what does that have at all to do with the common goals
and desires we have [not to impose communicability on you, but at the very
least we share a desire for autonomy, and probably a good deal more] and how
those may be achieved). On this level of philosophy of language I simply
can't grasp what the idea of incommunicability can mean (a rather funny
situation in a way, my saying "it doesn't exist" and then saying "you're
failing to communicate!" to you, while you say "there's this thing called
incommunicability" and then trying to communicate what it means to me.)
That's why I'd like to hear more about it philosophically.

I just read a few essays by Harry Cleaver, the one in Revolutionary Writing
and the one in one of the volumes of Open Marxism. In one of those (I forget
which) he makes a point similar to you and Marcos - there's a unity of
opposition to capital and (? which also is?) a multiplicity of attempts at
affirmation/construction of alternative ways of being, which are not
necessarily the same. I quite like the point. The problem I have with
incommunicability, though, is that I hear the term and think of a fixed and
unbridgeable gulf, the way that I will never be able to articulate why I
like Borges or why I'm vegetarian to my pet cat. I do feel that my cat and
communicate, after a fashion, but there are things which are beyond the pale
for that limited interaction.

That type of limit doesn't bother me when dealing with my cat but does when
dealing with political questions. Perhaps the gay person in rural Illinois
where I grew up and the Chiapas peasant don't understand each other, and I'm
not convinced they need to (I'm not any sort of Habermasian), but where I
get nervous is when it sounds like you're saying they can not. To my mind
there simply is an underlying unity of the struggles - both face
instantiations of capital (instantiations perhaps so particular and
divergent that there isn't any meaningful commonality to serve as basis for
mutually productive political activity). The denial of certain types of
autonomous ways of being is a unity, one that can be fought. This is become
awfully (even more) stratospheric, which is frustrating.

It might also help me to get what's at stake here if you could lay out
briefly what you see as the difference that an insistence on
incommunicability makes on the ground as opposed to an insistence on
communicability. As to Empire and so on, I'll dig up the reference when I
get home to my dear books and cat in a few days.

all the best,
Nate


on Sunday you need some wine to get through the terrible wilderness of
workdays.
-Luisa Valenzuela, "Strange Things Happen Here"





>From: Peter van Heusden <pvh@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
>Reply-To: aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>To: aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Subject: Re: AUT: RE: antiwar movement
>Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2004 00:07:43 +0200
>
>From:           	"Nate Holdren" <nateholdren@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>To:             	aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Subject:        	Re: AUT: RE: antiwar movement
>Date sent:      	Fri, 26 Mar 2004 14:49:49 -0500
>Send reply to:  	aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> > Hi Peter-
> > Sorry for the rough and schematic character of this (as usual) hasty
>post,
> > I'm pressed for time (as usual). Well put and I like the references to
>the
> > Colectivo Situaciones and Precarias a la Deriva. What's the problem,
> > though, with communicability? Sure, there are no communicative
>guarantees
> > - conversational misfire can always happen - but isn't incommunicability
> > just another unpleasant cousin in the same family as transcendence? It's
> > like talk about absolute difference from certain anti-hegelian camps,
>one
> > moves away from some of the sillier excesses of the tradition but still
> > retains an absolute, a foundationalism (or a despair over the lack of
> > achieving a viable foundation). The reason I'm drawn to the Spinozist
> > approaches to Marxism is precisely because in the idea of immanence
>(which
> > I don't pretend to really understand) it seems to me there's an
> > affirmation that the hacienda can always be built, in theory speaking,
> > that is, that relationships are always constructed and at least
> > potentially constructible. One may fail in a project, communication may
> > not occur or may break down, but that doesn't mean it was impossible,
>that
> > failure was guaranteed from the outset.
>
>Hi Nate
>
>Nice to have some meat to chew into (metaphorically, of course - I'm a
>vegetarian!). I think your last sentence gives me a place to start - you
>talk about a "a project", and people have often in the past talked about
>the "Left project". I think the problem I've got here, and the point I
>was trying to make, is that this implies communicability, that there is
>this singular project, or set of related projects, which are bound
>together by language. In this sense, language  becomes the transcendent,
>and the terrain inhabited by a set of (generally miserable) Left
>intellectuals.
>
>I'm not arguing for incommicability as some kind of virtue, but rather
>the opposite - I'm arguing against the notion that somehow there will
>ever be a time when we can all understand each other. I can't recall the
>section of Empire relevant to this - mind supplying page numbers (the
>first time I read Empire, it was on my Palm Pilot as a text dump, so I
>don't have a good sense of the layout of the book). Like the Marcos says,
>we're all embroiled in a war whose object is the redistribution of the
>Earth, and at the same time, behind the mask is a host of differences -
>gay in San Francisco, peasant in Chiapas, etc. And do / can these need to
>"understand" each other? All the time?
>
>
> > You say:
> > "strengthen of every singularity, the valorisation of each exodus, is a
> > better bet than to deny the particularity of each situation, and then
> > subsequently subsume of agency within some overall "revolutionary
> > strategy"" and I agree completely. But what does this have to do with
> > incommunicability?
>
>Um, in different language... listen to your situation, but don't imagine
>that you can speak that situation again. Create and discard languages as
>rapidly as you create and discard organisations. Is it now clear why I
>think rhizomatic power and the incommunicability (or shall I call it not-
>necessarily-communicability, ala. a Hollowayism) of struggle are related?
>
>As I mentioned before: in my old Trot sect, there was an insistence on
>relating everything in a "clear language" which ordered all struggles in
>a particular hierarchy of importance and priority. If you insist on an
>ultimate common language, aren't you heading down the sterile path that
>my old Trot buddies ended up in? Its enough to translate when
>necessary...
>
>Peter
>p.s. writing while tired.
>--
>Peter van Heusden                     pvh@xxxxxxxxxxxx
>Tel: +27 (0)83 256 0457
>
>
>
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