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November 19, 2006

Lumpen Orientalism

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Gauttari’s notes on Islamic philosophers are insufficient and in many cases poorly and incorrectly ripped off from obsolete French translations of works written on Muslim philosophers, manipulated in the most liberal and avant-garde technique: adding your words to them and then quoting or paraphrasing them back as an overseas philosophical support to your philosophy: inverse-plagiarism.

Lovecraft on the other hand knows very well the ineffable charm of Arabic names or Near and Middle Eastern pronunciations. Although both Deleuze and Lovecraft have contributed to Lumpen Orientalism (borrowed from China Miéville) as far as their reputations have allowed but on the other hand they have proven in a very pragmatic way that Orientalism in general which is mostly Lumpen Orientalism is not totally irrelevant, exactly because in an ironic twist the social, political and ethical bodies in Asia have remained irrelevant to Western tools of analysis and handling. This irrelevancy maintains its affirmation to the West and Western approaches through a cunningly political indifference. Such an irrelevancy illustrates itself in a pathologically but politically evasive and rebellious (against the West) situation to Western configurations not through radical dissociation but through superficially exotic off-beat and off-time entities and events which share (affirm) much with Western aspirations instead of negating the West in a vengeful or victimologic retaliation. An example of this encounter and subversive cooperation has already been followed in Lovecraft’s linguistic distortion and its social influences (the text is not available anymore).

If for the most part, encounters with the East continue to be Lumpen Orientalist, it is because in a contagiously and hugely active way – and not neutral or detached – both Lumpen Orientalism and the East itself can participate and join together in producing anomalous offspring through their converging irrelevancies, one in itself, and the other to the forces which try to map and environ it. And in fact, both Deleuze and Lovecraft (and in a strange way, more Lovecraft than Deleuze) have come to their viral existence as the offspring of this participation, which is potentially a massive object of examination, creativity and elation in itself.

Now, in a visually mind-eating and tongue-binding way, the first self-proclaimed and registered Lumpen Orientalist.

But more than satiating morbid interests in bizarre bazaars among archeological lurkers and people who try to sell you sentient junk relics and organic oddities I am looking forward to the Lumpen Orientalist’s photo-essay which interrogates the Deleuze problematic of Nomadism by rigorously delving into forgotten nomad fabrics and their blood-bond with the State.

Posted by Incognitum at November 19, 2006 06:39 PM