Thursday, January 7, 2010: 3:20 PM
San Diego Ballroom Salon A (Marriott)
Instead of writing narratives that make nihilistic movements ironic and so controllable by our discursive apparatus’ (e.g. the current destruction of savings in the face of capitalist liquidation of same; urbanization side by side with intense name-branding-competitions that result in ugly-showy buildings), why not write as if nihilism was not controlled-by narrative incorporation (“fine writing”), but became an actual subject, in fact, the subject of history? Imagine future narratives with such potential titles as “When Did the Professional Classes in America Decide to Become Pseudo-Aristocratic: A Narrative of Appropriation,” or “The Story of Peer-Review in the Arts and Humanities and the Infantilization of the University.” Such titles would shift historical narrative and allow one to make the destructiveness of, and with, nihilism an “improper” subject. Such “impropriety” might acquire argumentative if not outright truth-value according to the going norms of discussion.
Here, the power of nihilism would be called forth, a liberation of nihilism which would then not make it yield to dismissal by false, hence nihilistic competitors, usually associated with Enlightenment. Nihilism could then be registered, as it were, in the “mansion of history” as an ever-persistent and ever-insistent positive excess of representation. As “the subject,” a host of other concepts and relations would then be available for narration: foolishness and illusion, rigid belief and social pragmatism, cleverness and cheating, incorporation and digestion—elements in the historical “chemistry” of nihilism, each examined for its contribution and evaluated viz. what it added to the “magnificent stupidity” (Nietzsche) of history itself. In one conceptual “cut” that was also an opening, centuries of re-writing would be conjured before our eyes if we only affirm nihilism as something other than a demon to be warded off by our ever-vigilant police forces of representation (e.g. history departments).
Here, the power of nihilism would be called forth, a liberation of nihilism which would then not make it yield to dismissal by false, hence nihilistic competitors, usually associated with Enlightenment. Nihilism could then be registered, as it were, in the “mansion of history” as an ever-persistent and ever-insistent positive excess of representation. As “the subject,” a host of other concepts and relations would then be available for narration: foolishness and illusion, rigid belief and social pragmatism, cleverness and cheating, incorporation and digestion—elements in the historical “chemistry” of nihilism, each examined for its contribution and evaluated viz. what it added to the “magnificent stupidity” (Nietzsche) of history itself. In one conceptual “cut” that was also an opening, centuries of re-writing would be conjured before our eyes if we only affirm nihilism as something other than a demon to be warded off by our ever-vigilant police forces of representation (e.g. history departments).