Structure.Difference.equivalence
in the cafe i sat down and casually listenned to the conversation at the adjacent table, i was reading Simmel, they were talking about cyberpunk… Gibson and Sterling mostly. In the characteristic terms of. literary discussions, authorship, character, narrative, style, greatness and so on… still science fiction with an inevitable touch of cyberpunk utopia, you might think. But even as they spoke of the text in its genre… ‘well no, actually’ that’s not quite right… for i was thinking about how, in a few words to explain why notions of greatness, genuis and canons are impossible for me to take seriously Strictly speakng i arrive here from a strong relationship to theories and undersandings of difference which when filtered through the political arrives at a certain notion of equivalence. This begins from a personal history that begins with a smallish blue book on structuralism…. and perhaps a structuralist anthropologist who was intent on establishing equivalence between different kinship systems. Similarly a structuralist literary critic. established an equivalence. between literary texts, continuing to extrapolate deep structures in the literary narratives that could identify the commonality between them. This presents a form of structural algebra, drawing out, delineating the ideological motiefs that exist in all narratives. This was a direct consequence of the scientific, ideological and discursive analysis of the structuralist project.
I suppose I could go on to discuss and even define. the historical relations to structuralist and hegelian marxisms but I propose to ignore this for the moment. Instead, lets state clearly that in this line of thought the phantasy of literary quality as a reason to read and study a given writer is impossible. (And that was central to their discourse) Rather the difference between texts, as between kinship systems or economic modes of production, is read and understood as recognizing their equivalence ( of interest and value). With a discourse where equivalence is as important as difference, a folk tale, a genre story or a literary masterpiece are all of equivalent, equal interest.
…true you might understand the notion of difference. through the history of post-structuralist understandings of difference, irreducible difference, sexual difference down into notions of cultural and genetic difference in literary, social and scientific theory, here you would see a notion of individuation and pre-individuation (if you look hard enough), in these notions of analysis the particularism, the specificity of a text located in a culture and thus identity falls into place. But in this, it is still apparent that equivalence haunts the discussion, that difference allowed academics and readers to return to some fatuous notion that a given writer ‘x’ had greater value than ‘y’… whereas equivalence (≡) tells us that this is simply a dubious phantasmagoria allowing, finally the continuation of the status quo… hence the conservatism of their lovely (weak reading) discussion of/n the text…
and then vignettes.
