#stickiness

An infant, plunging its hands into a jar of honey, is instantly involved in contemplating the formal properties of solids and liquids and the essential relations between the subjective experiencing self and the experienced world. The viscous is a state half-way between solid and liquid. It is like a cross section in a process of change. It is unstable, but it does not flow. It is soft, yielding and compressible. Its stickiness is a trap, it clings like a leech; it attacks the boundary between myself and it. Long columns falling off my fingers suggest my own substance flowing into the pool of stickiness. Plunging into the water gives a different impression. I remain solid, but to touch stickiness is to risk diluting myself into viscosity. Stickiness is clinging, like a too-possessive dog or mistress.

“He used to think of the world of language (the logosphere) as a vast and perpetual conflict of paranoias. The only survivors are the systems (fictions, jargons) inventive enough to produce a final figure, the one which brands the adversary with a half-scientific, half-ethical name, a kind of turnstile that permits us simultaneously to describe, to explain, to condemn, to reject, to recuperate the enemy, in a word: to make him pay. So it is, among others, with certain vulgates: with the Marxist jargon, for which all opposition is an opposition of class; with the psychoanalytic jargon, for which all repudiation is avowal; with the Christian jargon, for which all denial is seeking, etc. He was astonished that the language of capitalist power does not constitute, at first glance, such a systematic figure (other than of the basest kind, opponents never being called anything but “rabid,” “brainwashed,” etc.); then he realized that the (thereby much higher) pressure of capitalist language is not paranoid, systematic, argumentative, articulated: it is an implacable stickiness, a doxa, a kind of unconscious: in short, the essence of ideology.”