is this a ridiculous proposal? is language the rational? morrison leaves the political-historical intact and creates the political-historical as real living mystical apparitions. the real is seen as a product of the past turned onto the present, giving it form, taking form as “reality”. the trees on the backs, the aborted baby… is poetry a form beyond the rational? is the mystic? the mythic?
what about academic writing – can it go beyond the rational? (look up alchemy – williams? referenced in ellsworth teaching position book)
it seems imperative that we not cut the cord to history, to the lines of thought, to the forces that have converged to create our present and our selves. is it? do we otherwise return to the tabula rasa of modernism? how can history remain as a site of re/deconstruction – opened, rather than as an enclosing mechanism that purports to produce people as products/objects (objectivism)?
is going beyond the rational simply a means of leaving an opening? ambiguity? is that not always there? and how do we avoid attempting to simply enclose more space in false empowerment structures? is diffusion simply a power strategy? is minimalism too tidy (reducing the self to nice binaries)? does it even matter?
how about starting with the rational and then finding openings, slowly cycling off-center, debasing the original, as the text whirls off in tangents of its own directions? or derrida’s ellipsis? how far off can one go before it is no longer an ellipsis?
the self is not so fragile. says the buddha (suzuki). we are being too cautious?
i wrote about finding the way, the path, heading east to the next sunrise, with no hope of return… that was during my binary modernist days, before i understood how the self/other relation exists. i wanted to abandon the self into the other…
now, traces, trails, directions out/from… where? why start with rationality? do we know how to start without rationality. do we know how to start without rationality?
which reminds me of some other writing i did, and that long period of abstinence i went through in which i refused to write or produce for fear of commodification…. i came out of it finally when i realized we cannot partition off the rational as other (else we are still controlled by it), instead we have to enclose it, embrace it, love it to death – show its own limits, its ridiculousness, its discrepancies. and then show its borders as porous… leading outwards and inwards are many paths. the rational and language are subsets of a larger picture, or one possible picture of multiple pictures. they are limiting/enabling modes we can inhabit – vehicles, bodies. they define possibilities and forms. they are beliefs. (see feyerabend or zen).
language and rationality are not the evil other. they are not pure. the medium is not only the massage. (mcluhan?) instead of attempting to partition off another world (which, by the way is politically impossible at the present moment) we can find those discrepancies and inhabit them. widen the cracks. (as castoriadis (or lefebvre?) said (look up email to teh)… 2 choices are spectacle/nihilism or finding the discrepancies within global capitalism/rationality/language…)
that being said, it means that we must be conscious of the tools we use, and look in particular at the places they fail us – for these are the places where potential reside, else we are simply re-presenting rather than (re)creating.
to forsake the self (zen buddhism – abandoning the self allows seeing the self as construction) vs. subverting the self (derrida’s ellipsis – is this an active destruction of the self… self-destruction or self-dconstruction) (where is deleuze on this?)
we must avoid taking the outside stance of the critic. to criticize meets that which is criticized is met head-on, as some sort of opposite, essentially leaving the framing/battleground/platform intact. instead, new non-binary vectors must take root from the old and spring forth in tangential (or elliptical) directions. see deleuze’s introduction to bergsonism. diagonal lines cutting across rather than pure intersections of this is mine and that was hers (footnote, footnote). instead, salvage what you can, modify it at will, and use it as (part of) a vehicle until it stops taking you the direction you want to go. (or maybe you have to switch mediums.)