[Reader-list] On critical integrity of the list

[Gayatri Chatterjee]

Dear Monica,
A timely "administering"!
Here is responding to your call for silent voices to speak up.

I was looking at Benjamin's Arcadian Project in Susan Buck-More's book ---
something to go to at a time like this.
Benjamin's magnum opus is huge and unfinished. If a "bigger is better"
mentality was behind the fall of those cities he was studying, then it is
quite significant, an allegory almost, that this grand project of his
remained incomplete.

Bush is already talking about re-building the towers, without having to say
anything about the tens of thousands loosing their jobs just because planes
have not flown for a week. Does this make any sense.....the airline people
here and some industrialists do not believe airline companies there are
telling the truth. Is the American government promoting these lay offs so
more people join the army? Why cannot the owners of these companies release
some funds and why must the American government bale them out? Do you have
anything on that?

How strange are some particular/individual histories: Benjamin committed
suicide when Paris fell to the Nazis and he did not obtain permission to
escape to America and join Adorno, etc --- the Frankfurt school being in
America, then.

What would Benjamin have said of the American Arcadian dream.... as he had
been writing about the "unfulfilled western dreams" of/in Paris, Berlin,
etc? One would think when one wakes up from a dream, one is back into
"reality"; but what if the dream is quickly supplanted by other dreams? How
is it that one does not even know one actually should be saying "nightmare"
and not "dream"? These are important clue to what is happening.

Last night there was a film on HBO (banal, but so timely and topical that I
stopped to see) called "Epoch" (written by Philip Roth and some others).
Four billion years of intelligence "something that we have been calling God"
decides to be manifested in Bhutan, in order to bring about a yuga-change
(only it is expressed in scientific terms). America sends scientists under
military supervision to check it out and annihilate it since it is not
"understandable" and also because the Chinese are coming. The scientist is
terminally ill, but is cured by his proximity to this structure that houses
the infinite intelligence (it can reorganise DNA molecules and is going to
start History all over again). When the military personnel wants to bomb the
structure and when the perceptive humane (liberal) scientist
intervenes, the military man says, "I am paid not to think". The end of the
film is just "amazing"....the superintelligence decides not to alter the
course of human
history, so impressed is It with the American man &
woman lead pair of the narrative. In an American narrative, Nation
(government) creates problems, Individuals provide answer......as do cities
and buildings, roads and parks.  It is a very old story...in earlier times,
it used to be society vs. individual.....I am groping....there seems to be
other stories that await telling.

What have we been paid, for not to think? But we are thinking...so, where
have all the thoughts, all those other kinds of thoughts gone....going?

What has been happening in this list is not untypical. It is at a time like
this that we can ask (but there is no time for any thinking and asking, it
would seem)
why we cannot speaking properly to or hear each other? I had tried to
initiate conversation amongst
two (separate) smaller groups, thinking it would be more intimate and we
would be in a position to ask stupid questions, terrible questions, be free
to show confusions and not feel the compulsion of coming up with smart,
intelligent thoughts. It did not work; everyone was impatient.... individual
fear manifesting in different ways...there was an occasional quick 'sorry',
but no long
term follow up on questions and opinions --- on the lack of the same.

Joining up with Shuddha's thoughts on image: is it time to move slightly
away from so much priority accorded to Image. The "sound" behind images are
deafening or sobering, but filtered out of our senses. Can we hear the
"sound" contained within images of those two tall giant crashing buildings?
All the war footage that we see, we see them without the accompanying
"sound". One of the guards digging there had said also something about the
"smell that is like taste". Well!

Yes, please let us move away from the yes/no action/reaction binaries. The
list is providing such wealth of information. Let us not be discouraged by
one incidence and let us again engage in discussions, in trying to
understand these details fully, spread that understandings and turn around
and ask questions --- intelligent or stupid, it does not matter.

best,
Gayatri