Is it October already ?




[this one goes out to all the underpaid designers in the world & call-centre clarions]


HEY. Hey there. All one or two of you. I've been listening to the Radio Tadomon broadcast direct from Beirut to Montreal. Check it at the Electronic Intifada, A-INFOS or Rabble Podcast Network.

It's OCTOBER already, which means I didn't blog for all of September. I've stopped blogging unbaked ideas & thoughts, for I found readying them here took more time than following through with their trajectory into other venues and deeper research. I also don't find the medium of blogging particularly conducive to the work of philosophy. The medium produces an encapsulated approach that resolves its apparent meaning in either hyperlinks or the subterfuge of brevity.

Enough said.

I will be at the Following Derrida: Legacies conference this week in Winnipeg. Drop a line if you are in town. I'm not speaking, just fading into the woodwork to spend some much needed time thinking. Rudolph Gasché's talk, "Without a Title," greatly intrigues me, for its feeling resonates with the rigor I believe deconstruction requires -- this feeling and thesis being nothing less than the erasure of "deconstruction" from its place as title:

In order to keep the memory of Derrida as a thinker, a reflection is warranted on what precisely is the legacy that he has left us. This legacy, I hold, is his implacable critical vigilance, the systematic questioning of all frozen thought. I suggest that this vigilance is based on a radicalization and transformation of Husserl’s bracketing and of Heidegger's rejection of thinking under headings. Faithfulness to Derrida's thought thus demands of us that we no longer relate to his thought under the title "deconstruction," which qua title, is, as Derrida himself has pointed out, a primarily North American invention.

While there is something here of an attempt to 'authenticate' Derrida (or Derrida's 'legacy'), this movement isn't as far from Derrida's thought as many would assume. Upon further examination of Derrida's sources and his reading of them, Derrida comes to light as a thinker who is quite attentive to his texts, considerably sustaining -- and thereby cross-pollinating or contaminating -- the tension between the ideal and the material. Neither may look the same after their revolution and displacement, now tumbling after the other endlessly with death at every turn, but nor has the process of deconstruction inauthenticated the concept of authenticity.

I have come to take more heed to Benjamin's infamous argument concerning the aura of the art-object, for dismissing it -- as if one could say: Benjamin, you are wrong, sample-based art has aura too! or aura doesn't exist! -- dismisses exactly what is at stake in this argument: the shifting historical sands in which the ideal produces differential effects, including the effect of itself.

I'm afraid all of this would have to be much more qualified & better explained ... through the shredder then & out into the chilling Fall.

For those of you who jump around buildings, and know of Parkour or Urban Freeflow/ing, check out these Russian dudes. Or just check them out anyway. It gives me some ideas for future Upgrades.


Transmission Out.
././.



posted. Mon - October 2, 2006 @ 10:40 AM           |