ICONOCLAST, n. A breaker of idols, the worshipers whereof are imperfectly gratified by the performance, and most strenuously protest that he unbuildeth but doth not reedify, that he pulleth down but pileth not up. For the poor things would have other idols in place of those he thwacketh upon the mazzard and dispelleth. But the iconoclast saith: "Ye shall have none at all, for ye need them not; and if the rebuilder fooleth round hereabout, behold I will depress the head of him and sit thereon till he squawk it."
-- Ambrose Bierce

Saturday, February 4, 2012

Primitivism & the Organics Market

"For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question"
Foucalt

Primitivism is simply the adverse tendency toward this sentiment, the live being putting to question the politician's existence, the very discourse that "mere life" is simple, mundane (dirty), uninspiring and best left to the privacy of the kitchen, bedroom and privy while the remainder, public life, is earmarked and reserved for the work-place. Like, is that all there is?

In old Persian kingdoms, Asa was metaphysical truth revealed only to politicians and priests; Druj was the lie bringing on pollution like a corpse or routine menstrual flow as a result of metempsychosis or demon possession. We now know that the social lie is actually the ethic of drudgery and truth is the dogma of donkey's asses and children really do come from the womb and not some sweat-shop producing good for walmart and the college of education like white eggs from the chicken machine in the back room of every safeway but veggie pizzas are still grown on farms...

And Zeus was full of shit thinking he could use his scrotum (or euphamistical "thigh") for that purpose. Of course, authentic primitives, that is, people without a political qualifier or the civil city-containment it refers us to, thought uterine secretion indicated the life-giving agent or maternal source of bio-power itself (a quality of as opposed to over bodies), and not an apalling offering to the corn faction, rendering one's self to shameful positions requiring head-coverings and propertied status – investiture is just the propriety of a proper tie. The moderns know better, as such primitive thinking or "superstition" is said to result in polluted minds – it takes one to know one. But even the gods failed to anticipate the exciting new world of bio-engineering and virtual academia, or broad-spectrum adenectomy, the institutional preclusive to constitutional demons by extracting not just the glands counter-receptive to bullshit, but all the rest as well – it's more than just for organ transplants and other commodity markets:

"The university discourse is enunciated from the position of "neutral" Knowledge; it addresses the remainder of the real (say, in the case of pedagogical knowledge, the "raw, uncultivated child"), turning it into the subject ($). The "truth" of the university discourse, hidden beneath the bar, of course, is power, i.e. the Master-Signifier: the constitutive lie of the university discourse is that it disavows its performative dimension, presenting what effectively amounts to a political decision based on power as a simple insight into the factual state of things.

What one should avoid here is the Foucauldian misreading: the produced subject is not simply the subjectivity which arises as the result of the disciplinary application of knowledge-power, but its remainder, that which eludes the grasp of knowledge-power. "Production" (the fourth term in the matrix of discourses) does not stand simply for the result of the discursive operation, but rather for its "indivisible remainder," for the excess which resists being included in the discursive network, i.e. for what the discourse itself produces as the foreign body in its very heart.

...The key point is here that the expert rule of "biopolitics" is grounded in and conditioned by the crisis of investiture; this crisis generated the "post-metaphysical" survivalist stance of the Last Men, which ends up in an anemic spectacle of life dragging on as its own shadow."

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