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From: Chris Jones <ccjones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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Date: Sat, 25 Nov 2000 22:40:23 +1100
Hi Karen,
when dan wrote:
"celt" and "celtic" culture are an imperialist myth, which groups
together disparate peoples as an opposed "other"? it is a historical
fiction: there literally were no "celts". it persists due to the
equally imperialistic _romanticism_ for a primitive, natural
grounding for ideas about a holistic-pagan-spiritual sort of past.
[ and the rest, cut for brevity cj]
He really did provide a very good frame indeed. A frame precisely
because it doesn't cut off and contain but allows one to go beyond
the frame, much as Mondrian does in painting. (It is an aesthetic
frame I refer to which D&G also write of, along with others.)
On Sat, 25 Nov 2000, you wrote:
> re: celts and palestinians; herodotus mentions both tribes in his histories;
> the celts are just referred to as the most westerly people in europe.
> Tacitus i think marvels at their fierceness; they held back the Roman
> legions for a good long time and the picts were never romanized. are these
> figments of the state writers imagination?
If you think of Heroditis and Tacitus as the empirical truths
that go into making a discursive formation called The Celts, then
absolutely you have state writing. But what dan also allows is a
disparate people and here again you have the possibility of something
else. As ruth points out it also allows an investigation of why this
myth of The Celts is so persistent. Dan also allows for the spiritual
which is in art. Nomadic writing, as a type of literature, can work
with all these which explains, I hope, why I find dan's frame so
good. As for the Celts being a figment of the state writers
imagination I would probably say yes, just as filiation is
imagination. That doesn't stop one from writing but raises the
question of how to write or what can nomadic writing do?
A similar thing can be done with The Jews. In Sylvia Plath's poem
_Daddy_ a critical reading is possible which draws out a metaphor of
The Jew as victim and avenger. Now which is state writing? I would
say, obviously, the critical reading and the metaphor is state
writing, whereas the poem is with Worringer's gothic line (ATP,
Nomadic Art p 492). The poem remains a nomadic writing.
best wishes
Chris Jones.
