ELL: Re: Incoherence I

Fri Aug 23 17:16:39 UTC 2002

I have added you to my 'blocked senders' list.

Julia
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Lawrence" <hoosiersky2002 at yahoo.com>
To: <endangered-languages-l at cleo.murdoch.edu.au>
Sent: Friday, August 23, 2002 4:08 AM
Subject: ELL: Incoherence I

> Yes Mike, it is about incoherence, ambiguity. What is
> being shown is the schizoid nature of late capitalism,
> especially in the West. We will analyze this machine,
> performing, necessarily, a type of curretage. No
> chance of it going mad, it was from the beginning.
> With sprouts of capitalism during the Ming, after
> feudalism, it really got started with the Corinthian
> Tyranny.
>
> Here we have the discovery of a mammoth. Someone
> wanting to know more about mammoths, mastodons, well,
> the theft is preaccomplished if they happen to be a
> certain genre of Eskimo. What the system gives with
> one hand, it takes away with the other. Now, any
> Inupiaq dictionary should have the term for mastodon.
> Anyone who has followed works such as Howard Zinn's
> People's History of the United States, knows of this
> curious ahistoricism, particular to the American
> rhizome.
>
> Examples abound. Ahistoricism dismisses Freud.
> American psychologists argue for introduction of
> psychology in the elementray school curriculum(New
> York). This was a few years ago. A few years before
> that, Derrida in France was arguing for the
> introduction of philosophy into the elementary
> schools. Derrida knew that if 'psychological
> ill-being' so akin to ortganized religion, got started
> at that stage in the educational system, it would be
> no time before psychoanalysis was forgotten.
>
> Yea even Freud's beautiful passages on the death
> drive, which most people don't understand, gets
> mutatilated in the rampant capitalist cartoon. This is
> much like present capitalism: with the fall of
> communism, there is now nothing to oppose the delire.
> Not that communism offers anything better. Erasure,
> replacement. This is fundamental to the system, one
> that is compelled to advantage its assasins.
>
> Erasure: reading Krashinnikov's Explorartions in
> Kamchatka(the Russian version), one notices that with
> the English trans.(Oregon Historical Society), one
> will find deletions about the use of the Queen Mother
> of poisons, aconitum, in whaling. Was this a mistake?
> In listing the names for men, one of them is left out.
> Is this a mistake too? The name in Kamchadal means 'he
> returned.'
>
> Perhaps this was a threatening name, considering the
> island of Yezo is not far away, And an enterprising
> scholar might go further and find that a Chiinese
> christ already happened(120 B.C.), or that there is a
> constellation in the ancient Chinese sky called Jizo,
> 'a groups of soldiers.' Or maybe that there are still
> little statues of Jizo along the roads in Japan. Under
> each succeeding layer, there's always more.
>
> So, one wants to contribute to opposing language
> ehndangerment. They arive in Yezo or Kamchatka, and
> haven't a clue as to the difference between crowfoot
> and aconitum, nor whether or not those were really
> Latin inscriptions on harpoon heads, or if that was
> not just a rumor. Ahistoricism never heard of nature,
> except that in its profound illiteracy, it knows that
> it should oppose it.
>
> Go to Winslow, Arizona. Set your backpack down and
> accept a drink from the Indians.  Learn that some of
> them are Viet Nam vets, get your clothes dirty setting
> on the sidewalk, and one may have a better chance to
> see that there is a spontaneity that they understand
> apart from the premeditated vibration that white-eyes
> exudes. And not even a program, a schedule. After two
> hours, I was allowed(a key word) access to their
> feelings about things.
>
> 'The history of man has been a long sequence of the
> misunderstanding of the signs. To oppose it is a
> duty.'
> (Paul Valery)
>
> From the indigenous point of view, they know of this
> duty, yet their attempts at it have been debauched,
> ignored, sabotaged, betrayed.
>
> Without too much difficulty, one could retun to the
> idea of chalk, writing, speech. Kamassian is an
> extinct language. We know how Kamassian grammar has an
> intimate connection to the cuttlefish. Does chalk come
> from cuttlefish? Regardless, cuttlefish perform
> camouflage, just as those with tenure stay camouflaged
> while their assistants with too many hormones
> drenching their idealism(Nazi Youth groups?)and not
> enough experience in controlling them, ply this fear
> of not belonging onto the socius.
>
> Welcome campus evangelization, for the more that are
> kept in the dark about themselves, the more that are
> kept within the infantilism of a relgious melting-pot
> paradise, forgoing the pain of individuation, the
> bonds of tenure remain strong. The weak religious
> expression in the the American rhizome, though, only
> has a tendency toward democracy, yet never quite
> reaching it. At this point, it's up to the individual
> to decide which religious group will eventually
> discover who and what is mentioned in your will.
> Miscegenation? Never heard of it. Marriage as
> legalized prostitution? That's absurd, 'I can find the
> right girl and get married in a courthouse.'
>
> At one time I thought it rude when two or more would
> speak another language in the elevator. How does a
> female, whose mother happens to speak Lo-lo fluently,
> convince herself and her daughter that their languqage
> should be used outside of the home? Do we who care
> about speech diversity have to make it 'cool' to speak
> another language, while at the same time begin to
> defuse the resentment of those who use English? There
> is a built-in betrayal concerning the English language
> too, yet those on hormones and materialism will likely
> not begin to notice it until on the threshold of the
> mid-life crisis. Don't try to explain that too soon.
>
> I will shortly write about the Kamassian Cuttlefish.
> In so doing, I am not concerned about kitsch. This is
> the beauty of it: right here one has the opportunity
> to oppose kitsch in the most profound way. Kitsch does
> not want to take the time to do scholarship. This is
> its weakness, its one-book weakness, and it is right
> here that the opportunity lies. This opposes the idea
> of earasure, that's the sensitive part of the 'guy in
> the elevator.' Knowledge envy.
>
> The Kamassian Cuttlefish will point to the erasure
> effect, for example, when Buddhism enterd China, as
> shamans found it increasingly difficult to make a
> living. One can see how christianity would welcome
> buddhism to America, no problem. Except that one
> scholar has already done much preliminary work of
> opposition for us. Joseph Needham's, Science and
> Civilization in China will be a key text as we take a
> look at an extinct language that, paradoxically
> enough, when studied, comes to life again. We wish to
> explicitly focus on the shaman, because he is this
> psychopath, the star of the show, who dissolves the
> kitsch of the colonizer and the colonizer's illusion
> of plagiarism. A matter of style, that is why
> medicinal gardens were locked from the public in the
> Middle Ages. There is something special about plants
> that were cared for by a practitioner rather than
> mass-grown, pun intended.
>
> Finally, indigens may not want the proctoscope, the
> Doc. Fine, yet don't expect us to ignore your
> language, it being a part of the world; it's fair game
> for our own brand of copy-catism. But some of us are
> studying, using these languages because we know that
> if we don't do it here in America, America could turn
> into a pressure cooker, a cultivator of fascism. Not
> concerned about eco-tourism, no cringing desire to
> visit. How is it possible to withold indigenous
> language once its published? Would not other, less
> ethical missionaries use it against the indigene?
>
> Using other languages in America, right out in the
> open, does run the risk of maledictions, projections.
> Nevertheless, a project to defuse the paranoia would
> include the finesse required to explain the benefits
> of learning a few words in German, French, Naskapi,
> Zulu, etc. The end result in my opinion, is that it
> would tend to counter the built-in betrayal in all
> languages.
>
> For whales, see
> http:lists.nbr.org/japanforum/showMessage.asp?ID=4701
> I have the full report from Shimonoseki, May 24, 2002
> if one cannot find it easily elsewhere. Ironically, it
> seems that Eyak Chief Mary Smith spoke somewhere else
> just the day after this report. Eyak is a challenging
> language, all those stops and such. Rewarding to study
> a bit of it, because there are some parallels in
> Siberian Udihe, which in turn have strong parallels in
> Uralic.
>
> For an interesting text by which to study the effects
> of late capitalism, see The Psychology of the Adaption
> to Absurdity. For reasons why there are Indians
> stacked in shelters like cordwood in the winter, see
> The Politics of Time, Rutz(ed.) American
> Anthropological Association, Wash. D.C.
>
> If connecting Yaqui, Zulu and Manchu shamanism,
> mnastodons, whales, vines and berries, seems
> incoherent, it does seem to postpone illiteracy for a
> few precious hours.
>
> *kia'ne pa' ?aku sa' kobal sewa' me kia ne to' iyo oi'
> cibela hai' ki' mne wiwilo
> I am only distant type of melon which is flowering. I
> am only sending out vines in all directions.
>
> For delirium that oozes in all directions, see
> http:amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-1-9604/msg00025.html
>
> On one of America's most monetarily prolific campuses,
> when philosophy arrives, they lock their doors from
> the stanger in themselves; invoking insularity,
> solidarity. Having  betrayed this stranger, they get
> precisely the reality that their truer homelessness
> deserves: exposure.
>
> See Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, and Slavoj
> Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom.
>
>
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