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War Machine texts event


It was evident that the War Machine texts were either parodies or wordgames drawing on Macarthy 592 and Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. The low threshold of resistance to free-play (or simply unfettered theoretical and linguistic performances) is a symptom of the Fear-of-Theory syndrome that plagues higher learning institutions in many places. It is not so bad in the Anglo-Zone, I gather. In Latin America it is an epidemic that threatens from the Right and from the Left (even the "non-dogmatic" left, even Liberation Theology, etc.).

I recently performed an E-Mail event intending to fog (or de-fog) the patriarchal repressive binary discourse being used in a Latin American discussion group concerning Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path guerrillas). Some reactions amounted to near death threats. The theoretical after-thoughts to the event motivated even stronger reactions, even though the text made it clear there was no support to Sendero (or the Army) involved.

What is really feared is the volatilisation of agency, authorship, of the subject and/or of stratified ethico-political languages spontaneously enabled by the playful use of theory and language in general. Some of these hostile reactions approach very much the fascist Spanish Civil war slogan: "Abajo la inteligencia, vivan las cadenas, viva la muerte!" (Down with intelligence, long live chains, long live death!). - "Who gives a fuck anyway!".

P.D.

Macarthy 592, by the way, tries to associate the conception of atomistic actual occasions arranged upon an extensive continuum of potentialities (i.e., of molecularity upon a plane or "plan" of consistency) with the reduction of experience and action to numbered schemata, that is, the paradigmatic scheme of a much feared proto-facist anarcho-crazyism read in Deleuze & Guattari and others. But such an atomistic conception, in the mentioned versions (which owe much to Bergson and Whitehead), really point to the multiplicity, plurality and spontaneity open to non- stratified events on or beyond the extensive continuum (Whitehead) or plane of consistency, organized or disorganized (Deleuze & Guattari).

Juan Duchesne

Date: Sun, 2 Aug 92 00:03 AST
From: J_DUCHESNE@UPR1.UPR.CLU.EDU

--> Postscript by Juan Duchesne