Industry uses as the fundamental principle behind all its initiatives the idea that all human phenomena, like all natural phenomena, may be treated as exploitable material, and thus may be subjected to the fluctuations of value, but also to all the random chance involved in human experience. So the same goes for the simultaneously spiritual and animal character of the voluptuous emotion, considered on the basis of its power of suggestion.
...One might say that aggressiveness comprises the very substance of the game being played. But by elaborating the various drives in the form of activities that remain merely their simulacra, said play aims to capture and thus channel the outcomes of the perverse basis implicit in the voluptuous emotion. Either this play empties of its content that which it had intended to make blossom, or it only manages to make it blossom as a playful activity by leaving that very basis intact. In order for there to be a simulacrum, there must be an irreversible basis for it, since that reality is inseparable from the fantasy controlling the reality of a perverse behavior. Sade says that the fantasy, acting within the organism and its reflexes, remains ineradicable; Fourier contests this: the fantasy can be reproduced as a simulacrum.
...The simulacrum in this sense is not however a kind of catharsis - which is only a redirection of forces - because it reproduces the reality of the fantasy in the realm of play, by staging the aggressive reality.
...the destruction of its object is inseparable from the perverse emotion: the death instinct and the life function cannot be dissociated from one another. Fourier championed the malleability, the plasticity of human drives: they were only “life” drives or “death” drives relative to how immutable, or how mutated, the fantasy was. And Fourier in turn never ceased to affirm that the lived events of resistance, aggressiveness, in short, of violence, formed the driving force of play. And if it is indeed a simulacrum, how could it fail to diminish the lived event of violence, as soon as said violence furnishes substance to the simulacrum?
The power of suggestion is the "set" of contingencies enfavouring an association. Suggestibility is here seen under a positive lamp, a synonym of sentience, that sensually participatory word (almost erotically) preceding "intelligence", its mere commodification. It brims with agency, the ability to move toward or with the association (as well as to break it when the spirit moves or the gas dissipates). The dissective effort to replace the polycontingency of child- (or horse-) play with narrow exigency transforms a suggestion toward persuasion and certainty; possibility to lack or otherwise, necessity; and agency to helplessness, the quality of slaves and bureaucrats. Such was the magic of Moses when he descended from the mountain with stone engravings, paradoxically outlawing their worship. Those alchemical tools – the police – metamorphosed the magic to science with pointed sticks. Science describes it, artists inscribe it, technicians erect it but cops make the conditions of need and their masters, superfluous (we only think it is greed), it just gives them prestige, full not of desires but demands so all will proceed to supply them – "good deeds" are righteous – none go unpunished. Trust is irrelevant to any civil situation, abolished by legislation but really only locked in a bank vault. In this sense, the fetish represents the total endorsement of a lack of imagination, the outright rejection of fantasy. In every other sense, the fetish superinduces it like a brick through opaque windows.
Once a boundary has been crossed, the transgression renders that boundary obsolete as a permanent or absolute structure. A provisional boundary, on the other hand, is by definition both temporary (shiftable as well as igno(ra)ble) and gifted, or free "for the taking" (or leaving). I'm thinking of the boundaries of Aristotelean, academic categories as well as national and pan-national or federation borders painted on the landscape. If mental health is indeed "well-being", it must entail the freedom (as opposed to right) to move, and not just in Euclidean spaces. Constraints, particularly ideological constraints, have never freed anyone from entrapment.
Where it may correctly be perceived that I endorse violence and therefore (incorrectly), terror, it is a positive violence which is intended at the expense of terror. It is the violence of a question which is not in search of answers – the finality of absolutism is the terror of dogma and its iniquitous need for absolution and omnimorality. Death is, after all, the answer to the question of life, and that is always enframed in terror for the Western thinker. Already, people are beginning to see that with all our political, economic and techno-religious progress, the power-over semantically crushing the power-of making "free" a word comfortable only in death or romantically idealist Utopias, we have truly constructed a living hell on earth and it's starting to sink in, that idea of Einstein, that a new kind of thinking is required over that which produced the problems. With Vico, I say it's an old kind of thinking – it is thinking itself. Without poetry, there can be no iconoclasty and without violence to the icons and false illusions of the status quo, the avant garde of normality as image without substance, there will be no room in the brain for anything different, and that is the picture of intolerance, where sentience only runs interference to the accumulation of trivia contained and then quantified there-in. I'd have to say poetry and iconoclasty, more than merely compliment, demand each other just like a magnet before it's been bisected. Thus, Heidegger spoke of the "saving grace" of poetry, certainly a sentiment as well in common with Vico.
Poetry then is negatively defined: that provisional discourse which is not an exchange of information, antagonistic or otherwise. A good metaphor can never be bought and sold – Baudrillard's symbolic without the transaction of exchange. The commodity is the greeting card, not the rhymes lying within. Almost always superfluous to the situation, that's why we call jingles (representing the sound of sense as it falls away from your pockets) banal or mundane lines and why no one but priests and police any longer believe in intellectual property, no matter how quaint or sentimental. It's the sentiment which is the thing, and that's voluptuous experience and not a phantasm at all: you can feel it.
Aristotle certainly didn't invent property, but rationalised it with his excluded middle, a gut amputation just like seppeku. This exclusion (the category as fenced enclosure) is the basis of property and creates the state (the British enclosure came pretty late), that phantasmagorical beast he called "The Greater Good" more recently labeled the stupid economy. The category itself prevents or whittles away the subtleties of language available to everyone, the ability to "read between the lines" or even put them to the question and not just up your nose. To extend the horizon, if only by innuendo, one can witness the outer reaches of a situation and escape or explode it. This means not only a view to history and etymology superinduced upon the future, creating the genre, fiction, as the present, but the eschatology of every corpse (or dead metaphor) emerging from our own mouth (or keyboard) – the autopsy as exorcism. It may be the ghost is merely the unconscious habit refusing to enter oblivion, and every investigation breathes life back into it. It may even resurrect in the process, such that we will need to erase the accompanying caption, "archaic" from every dictionary. No doubt we'd wish some to go into the void, but that is fruitless, should we stick to the first law of physics – Ex nihilo nihil fit – "From nothing, nothing never comes" (or goes). We put them on display in poetry and theatre just so we can share with others the cruelty of their intentions. Some have called this consciousness-raising. It's nothing that special. It is merely raising the dead so they can do no more harm behind our backs. Enlightenment? We merely flip on the floodlights to illustrate their sneaking about with daggers in the dark.
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