The Corruption of Flexibility & Movement: Spectacular Democracy (is there any other kind?)

"Contemplating ruins is an activity that is well suited to intellectuals. Sitting in what remains of Catalus's drawing room, they look around bewilderedly asking themselves what on earth went wrong. First of all we need to clarify the idea of crisis. I have been examining all the interesting implications of this concept for some years. In actual fact crises do not exist. They never have. Every now and then periods of change are called crises in order to favour particular political strategies or to justify their shortcomings. As we can see, it is not simply a question of terminology. The concept of crisis implies the existence of a linear process that suddenly suffers a rebound, as though forces that are either external or intrinsic to it suddenly cease to function.

That explains the great science of predicting such moments, at times replaced by devoted expectancy or by the more or less sanguinary efforts of the mole that keeps clawing away. Unfortunately these friendly little creatures do not work for us. A linear process only exists in the dreams of economists and revolutionaries who want to attest their power, or that to which they aspire at some time in the future. It might be instead that everything simply gropes about in a jungle of relations, giving rise to a situation that is quite illogical as opposed to one that is simply of a logic devoid of order and progress. In such a varied, contradictory context we find atrocities and barbarity one believed disappeared centuries ago flour­ishing alongside technological discoveries of a future that is already present. So just as it is ridiculous to talk of progress, the idea of crises - the prod­uct of such a concept - also falls. [...]

It is indispen­sable to be aware of the conditions that are affecting the reality we are operating in when we act, especially now as they are so different to the classical formulae that once explained things in deterministic terms.

Let us make it clear right away that none of these problems interests us. We are not concerned with the political problems of those who see unemployment as a danger to democracy and order. We do not feel any nostalgia for lost professionalism. We are even less interested in elaborating libertarian alternatives to grim factory work or intellectual labour, which are unwittingly doing nothing but toe the line of the advanced postindustrial project. Nor are we for the abolition of work or its reduction to the minimum required for a meaningful happy life. Behind all this there is always the hand of those who want to regulate our lives, think for us, or politely suggest that we think as they do.

We are for the destruction of work and, as we will try to demonstrate, that is quite a different matter. But let us proceed in an orderly fashion.

The post-industrial society, which we will come to later, has resolved the problem of unemployment, at least within certain limits, by dispersing the work force into flexible sectors which are easy to manoeuvre and control. In actual fact the social threat of growing unemployment is more theoretical than practical, and is being used as a political deterrent to dissuade wide social strata from attempting to organise in ways that might question the choices of neo-liberalism, especially at international level. So, precisely because workers are much easier to control when they are skilled and attached to the workplace with career prospects in the production unit, there is insistence everywhere – even among the ecclesi­astical hierarchies – on the need to give people work and thereby reduce unemployment. Not because the latter constitutes a risk from the point of view of production, but because the danger could come from precisely that flexibility which is now indispensable to the organisation of production today. The fact that the worker has been robbed of a precise identity could lead to social disintegration, making control more difficult in the medium term. That is what all the institutional fuss about unemployment is really about. [...]

In the same way, the productive process no longer requires a high level of professional training, at least for the majority of workers. The need for skilled labour has been replaced by a demand for flexibility, i.e., an adaptability to do tasks that are constantly being changed, and willingness to move from one firm to the other. In short, they must adapt to a life of change in accordance with the bosses needs. This is now being programmed from school onwards, where the institutional cultural elements that once constituted the basic technical knowledge from which the world of work built real professionalism, are no longer provided. [...]

As we all know, this is leading to a proliferation of cultural poverty in terms of taste and choices, a uniformity of demands and desires resulting in an even greater possibility to catalogue apparently free spontaneous participation. Then there is the flight from any possible diversity. Today it is codification that makes the man: the way one dresses, uses the same objects, looks for the same labels. One qualifies oneself through this uniformity, making the same gestures, moving, eating, loving, thinking and dreaming the same way as everybody else. This is the way the democracy of the future is being built. Soon politics will be born in and among people, but not before the latter have been levelled to the lowest common denominator in order to produce the flexibility necessary for post-industrial production. [...]

The break up of association was an indispensable premise for worker flexibility, and this could only be attained by abolishing the tyranny of absolute space and time.

Everything that led to the possibility of workers building a better world on and from the ruins of the old has now disappeared. It has all been ground down in the great race of accelerated procedures, the elimination of subject and object as distinct and opposing elements of a contradictory mechanism, which was nevertheless rich in prospects and vitality. In place of this mechanism we now have the domination of passage. The simple movement of something that reaches the receiver and the transmitter simultaneously, in real time, unifying them in the ongoing capacity to respond to simple, fast, coded impulses of communication. [...]

However strange it might seem, there are no specialists here. Everyone is specialised in a few routine procedures. The same hallucinatory world where programmes produced for future projects are entrusted to telematics has been substantially reduced: fewer and fewer sophisticated programmes are capable of producing yet others and so on, to infinity. [...]

I do not believe there is a specific minority in power capable of programming such changes. More than anything it is a question of processes that connect up, often inevitably... In a word, a series of causes and effects that could not be linked together, but which produced the conditions we could sum up today in the word flexibility.

So it is not possible to speak of a project that has been mapped out in all its parts. The adjustments of power are always approximate and tend to settle along the line of least resistance. Moreover, such movements can only develop to the point where the elements which comprise them reach their full potential. Today, the present disintegration upon which the new structures of power are being built must reach the extreme consequence in every aspect. That is, power cannot materially expand fully and leave an associative mentality and culture intact. Just as it cannot go ahead with a democratic mechanism based on past processes and values. They require new political forms to correspond to the new forms of production and social life.

So the project for a new kind of democracy is materialising, and that is the final point of these notes. Like all the projects of power this one is vague, but it bases itself on needs that already exist, are clearly visible, and could be summed up in a few essential points.

The main point is participation. The arrogance of the old political caste is not suitable for the changing conditions. The citizen must participate, not to make political life (which will always be a ghost in an artificial world) become real, but to make the decision-making mechanisms of power more effective.

The immediate consequence of democratic participation is the birth of the active citizen who has discarded his old disinterest and apathy toward politics, where men he considered superior were buried in the corridors of power, manipulating the lives of their subjects. The political sphere has been broken up into a myriad of possible openings for intervention. Voluntary work has been institutionalised. The monopoly of the professional politicians has given way to free political initiative where representation stays within precise credibility limits, even to the extent of certain circumscribed areas being controlled from the base. Politics begins at home. The leaflet, once an instrument exclusively in the hands of an active minority, is now commonly used as an instrument for voicing opinions. In this way everyone is under the illusion that they are reinventing the way to run public spending, by living inside and alongside the institutions rather than submitting to decisions that are made elsewhere. So democracy is widening and becoming rationalised. It is presenting itself as being equal for all in practice, not just in theory. The majority system no longer rebounds against those who use it, and a plurality of interventions makes knowledge of decisions possible.

This new pack of illusions produced itself almost spontaneously as soon as the old mechanisms of political groupings where delegates, charismatic party leaders, central committees with their dominant ideologies and the aims of liberation that imposed sacrifice and death, were all dismantled. All this has finally disappeared. What is left is flexible, objective disintegration that is clear for anyone who wants to see it, in that it comes from a process of development that is unequivocally ongoing: the process of production. So there are more ways to participate. The need for social justice, one of the fundamental aims of a movement that has responded to the putrefying old political world with total condemnation, immediately transferred itself, and it could not have done otherwise, to precisely the area of participation. This has been taken up by the new builders of ideology. It is they who are building the flexible ideology of future democracy. And this new dimension will give positive results. It will give greater possibilities to some and deny others any at all. It will guarantee the legality of political procedures of management, extend control, but make it seem as though it is being managed from the base, desired by the people, guaranteed by a plurality of opinions. It will allow greater security for the included, separating them from the excluded, building an unscalable wall around them, foreseeing new needs that are specific to the ruling class and are incomprehensible to the dominated. It will select the excluded on the basis of their possible participation, showing varying degrees of tolerance towards them according to their levels of participation. At the extreme limit, for the non-participants, the maladapted – the excluded excluded from everything – there will still be systems of segregation. Not so much the oldstyle prisons as new ones run by people in white coats.

These are the programmes for restructuring power and transforming democracy. Opposing oneself to all this is a part of the fascinating and indispensable revolutionary project that is perhaps still to be invented."

– Alfredo Bonnano, 1993-95
Let's keep our feet on the ground, please let's destroy work

 

An invention's near always just a discovery of what was already staring you in the face but only recognized when consciousness is in an altered state. Then, bam!, like it's brand new. With a little free association, the clues abound. Consider the synonyms: "share" with "participation" and then "partake", like "help yourself" or "it's on the way". That's almost a praxical algorithm, where all going in rhythm doesn't necessarily imply group-think, especially when it's practice, a feast or a dance – it might just be counterpunctual and quite unnecessary at that. Obviously, flexibility (or so it would seem) is not a big problem unless one's own taste-buds have atrophied. When neither a necessary flaccidity, nor lacking any vitality, flex should be strength mixed with grace so that each and every gratuity's free – never a theft if there's no property nor intrusion when stripped of authority.

When flex joins rexidity and movement's in form
direction's a hex to inform the forlorned
"of this genrealized idiocy" few would insist –
"trust in your taste when yer feeling lickerish"
– but who wouldn't really & truly agree
with "please do not meddle your metal on me!"
Be ever careful with what you intend
as I've made a crowbar, it could be your end.

– atka mip

Death Dive Entropy

Once (pagan) witchery was abolished, plagues spread throughout medieval Europe. Coincidence? Biological warfare was the response, euphamised as sanitation, as if cleanliness was unheard of prior to the plague.

– The Metaphysicsis

A hyper-exclusive focus or a process of repetition to the point of unconscious automation, addiction conveys a heightened intolerance to change or any minor perturbation, like a slight smudge of dirt thought harboring deadly implication (if only to your name). It would seem

"an unwitting, clandestine, unacknowledged addiction to the ordinary sets in against all idealistic pretension to the contrary".

– anomynous

The addiction may just be to invented or acquired truisms, tautologies of "selection bias" where red is ever the color of blood leaking onto a black floor and health is its opposite, the cold, disjunctive intrusion in constant need of purge or re-pare.

Like any good fix, that which can be turned toward or confused with stillness (which is peace), death (which is rest) or inert (albeit useful) object will be subjected by the state (co-opted), consumed by civilisation (this is, of course, more redundant information – if it's dead you can eat it, if alive you can use it to death!), after which it all turns to shit. Seems natural enough, just like digestion!

In 1988 or there abouts, the term extropy, a perfectly reasonable sounding antonym for entropy, was coined to represent "the improvement of mankind" (sic) via the advance of the machine. It is magical thinking at its worst, should one consider the machine as a useful, albeit disposable extension or appendage. There was a time it was only thought a clever means of getting out of work. But peace or hypo-stasis never seems to come; all work is thought a negentropic meddling to avoid the ever-present entropy, like death around the corner just waiting for your slip or a lax moment to occur – god forbid we get lazy with technology! That argument can proceed forward and reverse in perfect simultaneity, enough to get your panties in a twist.

Is it ironic that efficiency (defined as the greatest output – work – from the lowest input – energy) is said to be consistent with technological progress? (we call it "industrialisation" or "the development of productive force", and where wage is substituted for energy, "capitalism"). It would seem to me a machine prone to run out of fuel because of its own swelling (like a priapic membership) is nothing like efficiency – entropy may only mean release of pent-up energy).

Just to avoid stagnosis, as a machine-work's jutting growth is then deemed more important than its efficiency, quality steps backstage in reverence to improved or alternate fuel extraction and its accumulation. Quantity of work increases in the effort to produce more fuel and then, not even paradoxically, employment becomes increasingly scarce and competitive.

The system has, again, turned inside out (we call it "post-industrialism"), as the former output, work, is now the energy input (and perhaps a reason we treat our toys with more regard than children). In one sense, progressive entropy is a self-referencing system heading toward pure tautology – energy no longer circulates, movement stops, particularly when the inconsequential humans at the controls run out of food or can't adapt fast enough to subsist on increasingly toxic industrial excrement.

Negentropy, the incessant plugging of leaks, would only seem to produce chaos, the inductive reply to inflexibility, birthing new questions concerning any-and-all regimes or regimental representations. The thing and its negation have either merged, or were merely two heads on the same coin wagging along behind the tale from the get-go. "Exentropy" is just fancy sounding jargon for the flexibility of an in-out turn, well familiar to snow-bunnies making seasonal adjustments between margaritas and hot buttered rum.

Is it ironic that us homebodies who wonder what has become of our own lives do not question a death "urge" in wanting to see the light of day in different destinations, or even raise an eyebrow when state-of-the-art theories of cognition model themselves on the internal processing of primitive (by organic standards) computers, where intelligence is measured only by the speed of sorting increasing amounts of randomly stored (internalized) information, like a game of trivial pursuit, and proceed to call the artificial "superior", forgetting altogether that the "I" in A.I. can just as easily refer to insemination and to insurrection?

Like Marcel Mauss' insistence on gifts, like shedding guilt or hot potatoes, a moral duty, is it surprising that Georges Bataille could not see beyond the ritual cannibalism of civilized Aztec or problematic translations of indigenous potlatching cultures which consistently avoided or destroyed accumulated excess, for his cross-cultural samples which justified a universal focus on death and excrement as the secret code of existence, informing the operating system of the cosmos itself? Or was it all just a rationalisation to justify a relentlessly lingering melancholy over the death of his sweetheart?

the connection between material flow and social relations

So for how much longer are we to com-fuse the force [sic] of attraction (that grave aesthetic principle of chemistry and geo-magnetic motion dynamics) with the sick attraction to force? In grand potlatch style, the greatest return may be to destroy the so-called wealth than expropriate and redistribute it to the poor. To end the circulation of capital is to end its system-input, the sacrificial gift of labour; to stop the flow of paper under or across tables is to burn (or /shift+delete/) it, releasing noxious clouds of vapour-bits back into the vortex to return as harmless black rain visible only to the clothed eye.

Yet the connection between material flow and social relations is reciprocal. A specific social relation may constrain a given movement of goods, but a specific transaction – "by the a same token" – suggests particular social relation. If friends make gifts, gifts make friends.

A great proportion of primitive^[1] exchange, much more than our own traffic, has as its decisive function this latter, instrumental one: the material flow underwrites or initiates social relations. Thus do primitive peoples transcend the Hobbesian chaos. For the indicative condition of primitive society is the absence of a public and sovereign power: persons and (especially) groups confront each other not merely as distinct interests but with the possible inclination and certain right to physically prosecute these interests. Force is decentralized, legitimately held in severalty, the social compact has yet to be drawn, the state nonexistent. So peacemaking is not a sporadic intersocietal event, it is a continuous process going on within society itself. Groups must "come to terms" – the phrase notably connotes a material exchange satisfactory on both sides.

Economy has been defined as the process of (materially) provisioning society and the definition opposed to the human act of satisfying wants. The great play of instrumental exchange in primitive societies underscores the usefulness of the former definition. Sometimes the peace-making aspect is so fundamental that precisely the same sorts and amounts of stuff change hands: the renunciation of opposed interest is in this way symbolized. On a strictly formal view the transaction is a waste of time and effort. One might say that people are maximizing value, social value, but such is to misplace the determinant of the transaction, to fail to specify the circumstances which produce different material outcomes in different historical instances, to hold fast to the economizing premise of the market by a false assignment of pecuniary-like qualities to social qualities, to take the high road to tautology. The interest of such transactions is precisely that they do not materially provision people and are not predicated on the satisfaction of human material needs. They do, however, decidedly provision society: they maintain social relations, the structure of society, even if they do not to the least advantage the stock of consumables. Without any further assumptions, they are "economic" in the suggested meaning of the term (cf. Sahlins, 1969).

– Marshal Sahlins, Stone Age Economics ch. 5

***

Hobbes's particular inability to conceive primitive society as such is manifest by his assimilation of it, that is of the patriarchal chiefdom, to the commonwealth. This is clear enough in the passages of Leviathan on commonwealths by acquisition, but even more definitive in the parallel sections of Elements of Law and De Cive. Thus, in the latter: "A father with his sons and servants, grown into a civil person by virtue of his paternal jurisdiction, is called a family. This family, if through multiplying of children and acquisition of servants it becomes numerous, insomuch as without casting the uncertain die of war it cannot be subdued, will be termed an hereditary kingdom. Which though it differ from an institutive monarchy, being acquired by force, in the original and manner of its constitution; yet being constituted, it hath all the same properties, and the right of authority is everywhere the same; insomuch as it is not needful to speak anything of them apart" (English Works [Molesworth, ed.], 1839, vol. 2, pp. 121- 122)...

A few last words about the fate of The Gift. Since Mauss, and in part by way of rapprochment with modern economics, anthropology has become more consistently rational in its treatment of exchange. Reciprocity is contract pure and mainly secular, sanctioned perhaps by a mixture of considerations of which a carefully calculated self-interest is not the least (cf. Firth, 1 967) . Mauss seems in this regard much more like Marx in the first chapter of Capital: if it can be said without disrespect, more animistic. One quarter of corn is exchangeable for X hundredweight iron. What is it in these things, so obviously different, that yet is equal? Precisely, the question was, for Marx, what in these things brings them into agreement?-and not what is it about these parties to the exchange? Similarly, for Mauss; "What force is there in the thing given that makes the beneficiary reciprocate?" And the same kind of answer, from "intrinsic" properties : here the hau, if there the socially necessary labor time. Yet "animistic" is manifestly an improper characterization of the thought involved. If Mauss, like Marx, concentrated singularly on the anthropomorphic qualities of the things exchanged, rather than the (thinglike?) qualities of the people, it was because each saw in the transactions respectively at issue a determinate form and epoch of alienation : mystic alienation of the donor in primitive reciprocity, alienation of human social labor in commodity production (cf. Godelier, 1966, p. 143). They thus share the supreme merit, unknown to most "Economic Anthropology," of taking exchange as it is historically presented, not as a natural category explicable by a certain eternal disposition of humanity.

In the total prestations between clan and clan, said Mauss, things are related in some degree as persons and persons in some degree as things. More than irrational, it exaggerates only slightly to say that the process approaches clinical definitions of neurosis: persons are treated as objects; people confuse themselves with the external world. But even beyond the desire to affirm the rationality of exchange, a large section of Anglo-American anthropology has seemed instinctively repelled by the commercialization of persons apparently implied in the Maussian formula.

Nothing could be farther apart than the initial Anglo-Saxon and French responses to this generalized idea of prestation. Here was Mauss decrying the inhumanity of modern abstract distinctions between real and personal law, calling for a return to the archaic relation between men and things, while the Anglo-Saxons could only congratulate the ancestors for having finally liberated men from a debasing confusion with material objects. And especially for thus liberating women. For when Levi-Strauss parleyed the "total prestation" into a grand system of marital exchanges, an interesting number of British and American ethnologists recoiled at once from the idea, refusing for their part to "treat women as commodities. "

Without wanting to decide the issue, not a t least in these terms, I do wonder whether the Anglo-American reaction of distrust was ethnocentric. It seems to presume an eternal separation of the economic, having to do with getting and spending, and besides always a little off-color, from the social sphere of moral relationships. For if it is decided in advance that the world in general is differentiated as is ours in particular, economic relations being one thing and social (kinship) another, than to speak of groups exchanging women does appear an immoral extension of business to marriage and a slander of all those engaged in the traffic. Still, the conclusion forgets the great lesson of "total prestation," both for the study of primitive economics and of marriage.

The primitive order is generalized. A clear differentiation of spheres into social and economic does not there appear. As for marriage, it is not that commercial operations are applied to social relations, but the two were never completely separated in the first place. We must think here in the same way we do now about classificatory kinship: not that the term for "father" is "extended" to father's brother, phrasing that smuggles in the priority of the nuclear family, but rather that we are in the presence of a broad kinship category that knows no such genealogical distinctions. And as for economics, we are similarly in the presence of a generalized organization for which the supposition that kinship is "exogenous" betrays any hope of understanding.

– Sahlins ch 4. The Spirit of the Gift

[1]: society without the state. One is tempted to say "uncomplicated by the state" or "incomplicit with it".

Prefigurative Logic

Prefiguratively speaking, Virginia Woolf's Society of Outsiders (It sounds suspiciously like "the Invisible Party" sans its intellectuals) was comprised of the excluded, the barbarian daughters of the educated men, those insiders of the intellectual classes. Barbarian because they couldn't even learn to scrub a floor – that was, by gentlemen, considered quite beneath them. Mr. Gray Matter had arrived with enlightened science promising the liberation of the soul (all things mind) to leave the body quite behind in the pursuit of better mouse-traps to solve the labour problem, just how to pay them one buck and, undetected, take back two.

So to pass the time for centuries it was tolerable for their daughters to companion with the useless sons, chastisingly given the title, "effete fraternity", engaging in their harmless hobbies – art and poetry and arranging flowers (hence the term, "pansy"). Invisibles because from those crews poured thinking the most radical of philosophers and critics who still use (often abuse), perspectives intellectuals now all answer "Land a' goshin', who'd 'v thunk it!" and the high and mighty had to retreat into hiding in the basements, like bunkers (now they call them think tanks), of the ivory towers recreating modern banking institutions so that "high" society no longer meant "superior" (at least in public) but rather "crafty upward moving" scam investment, profiting from defeat by either side of any war – post-modern in that as for them, "the baddies and goodies" is just a fairy story told to kids.

Little did they recognize the most excluded class, the youth who'd crumble ivory towers like they were banking window-glass (and smash them too just to maintain confusion) with their eerie chant, "Whatever!". They've always been around but could escape into the no-go zone, headquarters of the SoS, the Society of OutSiders. Underneath her skirt or at her bosom, it makes no difference. They can't be profiled genetically, they've all got the same mother. Her name, known only by the criminal historians, is of course the infamous Ma Barker – and No-won-yu'd-know's daughter.

 

– see F. Boas, 1918 The Mental Attitude of the Educated Classes;
– Blaumachen, 2012 The rise of the (non-)subject

So why bother?

If "networked" affinity groups already match a shifting or cognate "family" pattern, why even bother with a kinship lexicon or reference? After all, it's an artifact of something many would gladly see an end to. Beyond the strictly genealogical which can easily be ignored – there are adoptions – the abolition of kinship might encourage horizontality and discourage the almost inevitable "nobility" factor, a nepotism seen along kinship lines (not to mention race or sex) when genetics/blood is the only acceptable standard. Of course we already see this operating when relationships are reckoned along many other sets of criteria such as class-line or political-economic orientation (when it's not a matter or circle of shared interest). The focus stays on difference rather than any commonality. But don't count out kinship yet: we call anyone with whom an intimate recognition is shared around almost any criteria a "kindred spirit".

The fact is we've been stuck on words so long, we've labeled cultures by a single criteria around which people organise, and at some point, thought that was all of it. Kinship is easy to spot because everyone does it one way or other, but that's not the only thing they do. This becomes obvious when such social forms are not mutually exclusive, nor are they found exclusively anywhere or when except where they're legislated; even long-held custom's not as rigid as an enforced morality or decree by an authority. Freedom only means that everything is shifty and the most stable patterns witnessed over time are only recognised because they're ever changing. It's only use of single criteria we object to, and that makes matching patterns disappear; it excludes them even when they're here; it makes for rigid thinking and poor vision needing ever-stronger glasses or psychiatric tinkering.

Besides the womb which all mammals emerge from, the other clue to why we might retain the concept or its reckoning is learned from orphans (alienation tends to make us all at least subjective orphans), but also from the elderly. Taxonomy need not imply a hierarchy as the vertical is only an attribute of the metaphor when we think of time as an up-and-down relation and space as side-to-side. There is some room for vertical reckoning which can add dimension to solidarity unrelated by necessity to power. I'd call it vertical empathy. The flat-out horizontal often leads to an ageist view which, just like any other renders others invisible. The vertical allows one to notice that the preceding generation is also made of siblings and cousins; top-down empathy is also known as pride and love and nurturing from grandfathers and mothers.

In cognatic social organisations, for example, all one's mother's female age-mates might be called "mother" and the distant ones "Aunt". From their viewpoint, you are their child, or after visits, "niece" or "nephew". (There was a time not long ago when any elder might call us "son" or "daughter", and in my dad's time, he called his female elders "mother" – it was only the authorities he called "cocksucker"). The orphanage should be almost impossible except in a dystopean fiction or nightmare (and they are warning clues that really almost anything is possible, even if unlikely – a flying pig would likely have to reside in a different galaxy, or at least where issues of gravity are very different, else it is a metaphor like 'superstitious thinking, for how we got the flu or need to murder all the chickens).

The marriage ceremony is only a rite of passage or transformation. One goes from cousin to sibling, but after the public ritual (and public is the most important clue) the social role has changed to neither sibling nor cousin but spouse, a completely "other". As other, all matters become irrelevant, your subject to mass retaliation as if a total stranger: domestic abuse itself would be the most self-limiting behaviour. But in this situation, the wedding band or marriage bond is not a tie or demand of any kind. It's a synergetic third emerged from symbiosis producing new generations – the "other" (than kin), if endearing, allows the community to endure beyond a life-time. The bond itself can split at any time thereafter, but amicably when there's been another ceremony transforming an other back into a sister or a brother, distant cousin should they walk very far away. We should know by now that extreme motion's all that cancels gravity allowing bodies to leave their orbits: "I'm outa here", they say.

A family is defined by recognition of three to five dimensions over time, spread thin or wide, as one's most immediate live affinity group – the life-span's called a generation but reckoning extends as far as one can, not only or even recall, but resonate. What's blood or even species got to do with it? Every reason in the book has been used to affiliate, but the funnest projects consistently rally around the null criterion, that is, it's when its for the hell of it. Null means nothing's there to make it permanent, where even life-long friends are not constrained by the relationship. Anything else is just a box for your booty.

Cousin is a non-gendered expression.

There is a social form which has not only seen the most experimental practice in the history of the species (we still imbibe small portions), but doesn't rely on single-gendered categorisations as a linear criteria or principle of association. Ethnologists called it cognatic social organisation or bilateral kinship reckoning. The focus for provisional affiliation is completely horizontal, out toward siblings and cousins. Without our sort of marriage, blood is not the factor (as such, we're the only ones who consistently produce orphans).

This doesn't mean ancestral or other complicated relations go unrecognised, nor, obviously, that gender is annihilated. It only means that distinctions are unimportant 'til they come up. Like some visitors, they more or less announce themselves. Ancestral stories are important to establish new connections, should one need a quick get-away or a friendly hide-out. Few would like to come to town a total fucking stranger. With clans, there might be signs or totem poles one can consult, and if in part they match your own, you should be welcome. Otherwise it's good to know your ancestors and keeping track of their location. Name-dropping may be the oldest form of greeting.

All age-mates in a crew are siblings, everyone else cousin, at least until one moves over and then the nomenclature either reverses or becomes more inclusive. To call one "no kin of mine!" (despite any genealogy) would be among the worst forms of insult. But as affiliations are free to shift, antagonisms don't endure unless, like marriage contracts reading "until death do they depart" insisting on the vow might be the only form of satisfaction (where backing into corners or up against the wall may be the only route one can safely take – one can only hope a charging goat will settle the affair). It can get complicated, as for hooking up one seeks the place of cousins. Only in relation to a current 'spouse' is the siblingship deconstructed, hence the ceremonial ritual as a rite of transformation, it indicates a party, not a politic.

Should things go bad, it takes no brain or calculator to see just how many angry siblings can arrive to cast you out or bonk you on the head. The point is, for any type of affiliation, one can extend or contract the network as far or near as desired or is necessary. It would seem what's been called "manarchy" could only last the time it takes to get kicked in the ass – it's called self-limiting but only where there's common sense of solidarity. Today it seems that kinship is either a pain in the backside or a total irrelevancy. Yet how familiar is this system when there's no official near to mediate? It's obvious we take kinship too literally. Only without the state or within outsider society, one is free to pick and choose one's relatives, and friends are likely, just a distinction to reduce redundancy. No category can be exclusive when there are no absolutes.

Gender Wars & Organisation

“a society is a conglomeration of people joined together for certain aims; while you, who write in your own person with your own hand are single. You the individual are a man whom we have reason to respect; a man of the brotherhood, to which, as biography proves, many brothers have belonged. Thus Anne Clough, describing her brother, says: ‘Arthur is my best friend and adviser... Arthur is the comfort and joy of my life; it is for him, and from him, that I am incited to seek after all that is lovely and of good report.’ To which William Wordsworth, speaking of his sister but answering the other as if one nightingale called to another in the forests of the past, replies:

The Blessing of my later years
Was with me when a Boy:
She gave me eyes, she gave me ears;
And humble cares, and delicate fears;
A heart, the fountain of sweet tears;
And love, and thought, and joy.

...Inevitably we look upon societies as conspiracies that sink the private brother, whom many of us have reason to respect, and inflate in his stead a monstrous male, loud of voice, hard of fist, childishly intent upon scoring the floor of the earth with chalk marks, within whose mystic boundaries human beings are penned, rigidly, separately, artificially; where, daubed red and gold, decorated like a savage with feathers he goes through mystic rites and enjoys the dubious pleasures of power and dominion while we, ‘his’ women, are locked in the private house without share in the many societies of which his society is composed.”

– Virginia Woolf, 1938, Three Guineas

Consider a very different set of customs, a matrilocal society without institutionalised (or indelicately bound) marriage, where the male creates a sisterhood (the female, a brotherhood) by way of family connections, it's almost like a gift (and no, except by retrospective chance, protection racket), not only among siblings but nonconsanguines as well: aunts for every child and new prospective interests for each adolescent looking for a date. If here, there is a sense of marriage, it has long been suggested as occurring between groups (thought in terms of "corporate mergers" between organisations) but is more correctly (in our hypothetical case) only a jam between or unlocked door able to swing both ways. Another excuse for a community celebration – the exposure to novelty, piqued interest, peak experience, potential crew-mates of all persuasions, and all with letters of introduction.

encounter group, n.
a group of people who meet, encouraging personal growth, self-awareness, and social skills by means of emotional expression and interaction. (see 'crew')

– the dictionary

We're not just speaking of the Hibi Jibi's or those who weren't exposed to civil dictionaries. The Russian spaceship, Mir (from miru: 'peace' or 'Mary' (or see maru, 'far eastern ship that sails the sea'); lit., 'a peasant commune', on a par with urban soviets before the bullshiviccars came), may have been named for such groups , the entendre being a home away from home, but still in orbit and whose residents can come and go. When the raskolniki ('those who split': ie., 'old believer' heretics) made their final break with the Russian church starting in the mid-17th century, a progressive divorce was finalized by the time of the peasant rebellions at the turn of the 20th, the first sacrament to be abandoned was marriage, a theo-secular law the world over to the extent it is now considered a "fact" of nature, no more a topic for interrogation. I've always thought the peasant the real brains behind the species. Criminalized and tortured for two and a half centuries (only to become more and more an outsider society), the tsar in 1905 legalised the movement just to keep from being totally enflamed by the out-of-control peasant rebellions. The nihilists from town were bad enough, and everyone was getting twitchy. And then they joined the war out west like changing channels to see what's playing on Emp-tv, but that's another story. It's always been repeated so we can come back to it later.

From the boy-child's perspective, if the "father" moves with the mother's group, the social (socializing) father, which is to say the one with first hand experience with this rather than that set of salient experiences, the "encounter-group", may be the mother's brother, who may be moving with yet another group. The biological father is free to split without concern for the child's non-material "welfare", as that is already taken care of (of course, material concerns are taken care of by the entire community – it may in fact be difficult to distinguish the two). Besides, he's likely someone else's uncle or a brother. The constitution (membership) of the group itself would be seen as continually shifting – the "home" group is a psycho-geographical hub or reference, even a place-holder, not necessarily a central office, base of deployment or box to plant your booty. The correlation of growing up human with achieving property status (as nothing but a piece of it) is possible, but only as a macabre nightmare.

One's sense of direction in adult life is very often based on the topographic orientations witnessed in childhood, persisting like a metaphoric universal translator, useful almost anywhere but within the metropolis (those born to it – the Metropolians – have an obvious advantage, but that is one of those sorts of "truth" most often answered "Duh!", only obscurely related to the Russian "Dah"). The group is "in name only" plus one, and that "one" is the territory (not a nation, but still the country: it does not imply property). Territorialised, we call it a band or even tribe – or dialect tribe, to be more precise – those on speaking terms – a territory may be utilised by more than one band, not to mention species. Nominalised, we call it a clan, where the criterion of membership is defined by consanguine or other connection to a mythical progenitor (which may or may not be "human", nor represent a single person). And not to intentionally complicate matters, a tribe or band may be composed of many clans.

Matriliny only suggests the maternal is the salient line along which relations are rendered (they went both ways in Russia^[1]). In this sense only (and not in the genetic) we are speaking of material relations and their development is generative, not productive (except from a certain point of view). In either case, there are neither orphans nor wall flowers and once the blossom appears, seeds are not constrained from breaking umbilical chords (assuming there has been sufficient experimentation to ensure competency) to spread more than just rumors. Remembering stories, one can snap back like a bent branch on a forest path hitting you in the face without a moment's notice or hesitation.

Patriarchy takes the nominalised title itself and redefines gender roles. Biological male (and everything in that direction) becomes a social category with form-fitting expectations which, in importance, supersedes biological condition. There can in fact be a matriarch, as long as she is "manly" (fits social expectations in the "male" gender category) or delegates subject-males to be and do so. Imperial China institutionalised the position in the dowager, although in symbol only. In lieu of a "strong" male emperor, China was an oligarchy. Even then, any monarchy must consider the bureaucrats else reign in fear of assassination. Dynastic change (when antagonism is at its highest or a priori agreed upon as "term limits", naturalised by accompanying cyclic astrologic (for example) events) becomes incorporated as just another part of the job description to preserve monarchy itself: the expectation of civil war and revolution are all part of the script.

The imperial body guard was never concerned with protecting a monarch or oligarchy from the people as disgruntled "subjects" but from each other as "competitors", hence, there are always at least two sets of (legal) books. There is no sense of exception or hypocrisy as the two civil bodies (aristocracy and populace) are considered unrelated. Patriarchy is the good old boys club, and whose enemy is everyone else, especially useful girls and unuseful (that is, "all") children outside pragmatic means to carry on his fame. It is built into every avant guard group except those that oppose the patriarchy itself (the status quo). Even so again, having only one model to mimic or even critically modify, the counter group often retains the same structural relationships. Only from this point can a "true" matriarchy emerge, and the show's spectators will hardly notice a difference. Outside of specific battles on specific fields of combat, there has never been a sustained war of the sexes. Gender war is the conflict of categorised social expectations, concerned only with the role and it's performance. Again, unfortunately, the manly critics draw blood as both punishment and recompense.

"it seems both wrong for us rationally and impossible for us emotionally to fill up your form and join your society. For by so doing we should merge our identity in yours; follow and repeat and score still deeper the old worn ruts in which society, like a gramophone whose needle has stuck, is grinding out with intolerable unanimity... We should not give effect to a view which our own experience of ‘society’ should have helped us to envisage. Thus, ...we believe that we can help you most effectively by refusing to join your society; by working for our common ends — justice and equality and liberty for all men and women — outside your society, not within.

...In the first place, this new society, you will be relieved to learn, would have no honorary treasurer, for it would need no funds. It would have no office, no committee, no secretary; it would call no meetings; it would hold no conferences. If name it must have, it could be called the Outsiders Society. That is not a resonant name, but it has the advantage that it squares with facts — the facts of history, of law, of biography; even, it may be, with the still hidden facts of our still unknown psychology." ( – ibid)

Salt II: Vanguard, a mixed review

"Skepticism that is not skeptical of itself is called nihilism."

– Transience

an “anti-vanguard” vanguard would be a rearguard, for backhanded reach
outside of the military formation and into the generalised linguistique
the vanguard is duct tape across the mouth, not a freedom for speech
the rear guard is an ear-plug, tampon or diaper in all senses anatomique

– Ronaldo (Frenchy) Flume

Unlike the massive globs of honey which have been historically spread to plug up pores in the pursuit of poisonous persuasion, the ion gate or diaphragm on the surface of a cell works quite well with just a saline dash to enflume osmotic oscillation (also known as a hyphenated in-out flow) such that nutritious soup does not over-saturate to capsize or to inundate. Salt has proved the bestest in a drought or blight as an abundant electrolyte when stirred & mixed with water, should too much sticky truth spread all around, need watered down, it's like a winking eye or raised eye-brow. In a toilet bowl, to expose and flush an affront or a scandal, there's nothing one need say: just turn the handle, adjust yer pants and calmly step away.

"All language involves the use of words (and associated generalizations) that segregate the infinite experiences of life into various kinds of buckets. This is a problem we will always have, because we cannot think without using words (and generalizations) but these words (and generalizations) often turn out to be clumsy instruments (ie: since truth is always concrete, and no two phenomena are identical, there will always come a point where the system we use to categorize things into buckets breaks down and no longer corresponds to the imperative of life)."

– Ben Seattle

Concerning thoughts that sentiment's nutritious but exclusive or constraining when it comes to language and to thinking. If imagination is a generation of images, and vision is what makes sense to eyeballs, then "anarchist ideals" and other sorts might be better thought "perspectives". Imagery acts as a rear guard against frontal (lobbed or lobe) assaults accusing of "idealism" and "adolescent incoherence". In lieu of seeing things, what some call hallucinations, some of the more creative folk hear voices in their craniums. For skippers of literary buckets, talking pictures could only be enjoyed within the walls of sanitariums. Imagine the demands on child-students to encourage silent readings (no noises are allowed from them in organised currriculums) like humming or addressing fingers when they're making sums – it's just not very intellectually aesthetically appealing. Certificated knowledge must bury anything that smells of something sensual. It's all a matter of anatomical specialisation and propriety as nothing's more offensive to adultish graduates than reminders they too once expressed a thing resembling high spirits or teen angst. It's not something one transcends with maturation; it must be crushed anew in each succeeding generation.

TIME TRAVEL

"Unless we master time travel, we are kind of forced to acknowledge current conditions and work with what we have."

– Colette (Wildcat)

A form of communication, time travel is easy, and it's always been available. It's a matter of extending perceptual horizons. This becomes possible if we retain the same degree of skepticism we may have toward the present when exploring the past and future. Research into the past is more difficult or laborious (like the present it's an entanglement of hearsay) than exploration of the future which is correctly labeled imagination, fantasy or fiction. This zone has always expressed more of what we would call "truth" or "realism" (at least from in-between the lines) than its antitheses labeled "fact" and "history" (not to mention headline "news"). Expanded consciousness in the perspective of perceptual extension is all about bigger pictures and like spider webs, very effective (not to mention "affective") as long as we apply a dash of salt to every positively given affirmation.

NO SALT NEEDED:

"Profound exclusion prevails in realities where those who have privilege to be in the city can go to protests and have somewhere to go at night. Voices of mothers are so not part of theories and dominating voice of radicalness that claims to shape what is said and done in these times. If it isn’t hierarchal white males running the show, then it is dogmatic male based philosophies that are. I am steeped in the experiences of frontline mothering that has also been witness to frontline nursing mothers of Dine defense of sacred land, Mayan defense of ancient culture and many other struggles where mothers, grandmothers and newborns take on the hired thugs of corporate rape and pillage. What those who are most saddled with the care of others must do before leaving in this warped country to go protest is not even remotely considered. I find the exclusionary dogmatism that has most influence, or seeming influence, is very clever at excluding those they do not wish to consider or bother with. How revolutionary is that? Same old male dominance in another convoluted form is nothing new. Nothing at all. Even if i do continue to struggle all too often alone to participate, you will NOT erase me or my hard earned perspective."

Swaneagle Harijan

"I think we need less posts on the internet and less pseudo-critical analysis and more face to face dialogue and more actions. We have F4E why can’t we have a weekly party or better yet spur-of-the-moment parties where we feed and commune with people."

– godlesshopelessliberty

– see Lenin was a clown

ON TRANSCENDENTALISM AND ETYMOLOGICAL CORRECTNESS

While some may see an up and down wobbling of the prow of a boat on rough seas (scend) still crossing (trans-) before its clamping down by biting teeth (dental) as an adequate philosophy (or -ism) to live by, another more accepted interpretation would be, on analogy with ascend (move up) and descend (move down) merely to move across a surface, precisely what our little bouncing boat was attempting to accomplish in the first place. It somehow loses the nonmaterial (in this day and age, 'spiritual' or 'ideal') sense of the impossible like an after-life arrived before the dying. It is a crossing of lines (chiasma) or a shot across the bow or bow across the string or a horizontal spread like a swipe of butter across the bread. From the perspective of an ocean liner or a cutter that's slicing water, making lines or wakes as if a knife through deadly cubes of salt-free butter, should it be itself the mourned object of a wake or swamped by one and swallowed by the sea, what difference to its end or transformation (they used to say "corruption", the rotten business of death and nutrient for corporations) whether bit with teeth or swallowed by a gummer? They seem the same to me!

The imagery is what suggests the commonality between diverse interpretations, like some texts are unreadable without the illustrations. Rhythm and melody support them like an old cement wall to a creepy ivy. Without a certain ambiguity (since our theory suggests an anarchic linguistic usage or "poetry" as an originary form of mouth-to-ear or eye-to-eye expression demanding of multiple entendre and not up for a vote or too much manipulation – the picture comes all by itself with a pinch of experimentation) inviting exploration, the image might never coalesce – we'd all be bound to take it on authority. Representation (a sign that's an imperative) must there as well be thrown out of the window. Rationalism must stop at the point of imagination which is the alphabetisation of thinking (Ivan Illich) such that what was once a reminder as an image loses all graphically poetic value (the word is everything, the letter nothing) and thinking itself can go nowhere but into rigid thoughts given the attribute of disconnection or individual autonomy – discrete parts in and out of connection – resonating with a mechanic's ontology of efficacy and propriety.

"True" to hearing foreign utterances, it's been said there was no space for spaces in old Irish writing. The null symbol is just a silence, neither well-placed hammer nor an inconvenient stammer: a page full of them would be blank, from French for 'white', but not unlike the silent canvas on which Keith Richards applies sublime brush-strokes when his finger touches strings. At least that's the picture he came up with. What's meaningful is not confined to cognitive intellectualisms or signatory transactions – sometimes it's just a "feeling" which can take you places. The literal in literary juxtaposed to "art" would seem cognitively anti-metabolic – there's no space for the aesthetic when everything's been tied or legalised as economic – could such a world be said to include any sort of growth except to ever-diminishing numbers of exploiters racing to the finish-line of an ambitious, self-defeating purpose?

Betwixt and between (aka, a crisis) makes us scream (or is its borders screaming at us?), existence in a hard place hinted at by Plato (and even Heraclitus) and legislated by Hegel (Engels made it natural): nature must conform, as dialectic friction is now the only game in town – they say we all must struggle since for everything there is no season, just an opposition. On this the commies and republicans both agree (after all, we're only talking "democratic"). The game is played till it's transcended, with the synthesis of opposites, like a black and white world turns forever to just one shade of gray.

The idea that in a world where everything is different, what is common is no project, solution or end in constructing sameness. Common is what is shared, nothing more except that in this case we can recall a quality some would say "It's free!" else sitting at the table is for others a call for silence & seclusion as all meetings seem to generate antagonism projected onto chickens pecking scratch. Might it be that we're too proned to focus on the difference which makes a difference and never have the time to tend or tender eating (literally as well as figuratively)? The hypocrisy is that universal ADD is chemically treated as disorder all-the-while promoted like a never-ending bath to cleanse or trump the lack of questions like "how high?" when someone says to jump or is it just confusion of an acronym with the calculations some obsessed accountants label math?

"What power has "the light of truth" over blind Tiresias?

Light divides; truth becomes double. A rift is thereby opened, separating truth disclosed by the light of reason from sacred, secret truths. What reality does this abyss have for Tiresias?

Tiresias experienced the truth of "the other side of existence" to which rationality, enlightenment, remains forever blind. The price paid for this sacred truth was the sacrifice of sight.

The offense committed by Tiresias was not against Hera: it was the decision itself, by which he betrayed his privileged knowledge of the fundamental non-duality of existence. Blindness was both his punishment and his recompense.

Blindness bestows the gift of prophecy. The blind visionary cannot but fail to enlighten those blinded by sight and light: sacred truth remains ineffable, incomprehensible according to reason and speech."

– A Meditation on Tiresias

or it was never there to begin with, a nothing or null symbol which by all appearance must seem by definition out of reach? Seems to be the nature of belief, 'cause no one's ever witnessed nothing and lived to tell about it or was refreshed to carry on a trek across the desert by pausing at the Mirage Cantina for a quick drink and then I'm outa here.

– RAW ('Revolution against the Word') central committee communi-que?

IPLD Phase Two, Part Two: The Alpha Male(add a grain or two of salt)

But this is what I meant to discuss, dominance relations, the intended continuation from paragraph three in the previous post.

No doubt many of the assumptions are implanted into children at a very young age (even inadvertently passed on) by primary school teachers or parent-graduates. Should the engrams fail to stick, the television (and easy-to-access "mainstream" webcasts) incorporate intellectual theses into entertaining themes (ancient Greeks saw the importance of the process by incorporating and deifying 'bronze-age' personifications of culturally processual categories or patterns – renamed "goddesses" in the guise of Thetis and Themis, patronettes of social organisation). Cinematised graphic novels & comics are still saturated with the ancient good vs. evil dialectic. The narrative must go on.

The institution of state-sanctioned (or religiously 'sacramental') marriage allowed the supersession of female as an adverbial category by nominally "real" male gods concerned with property management. Prior to permanent or regulated ('authorised', meaning 'established by a higher authority') marriage, there never was, it appears, a matriarchy. There may neither have been a goddess outside a poetic, theatrical or iconographic sense. What we call matriarchal families today are very often run by chicks with (metaphoric) dicks. It may be more clear if I used the term "balls" and Marguerite Thatcher, Condoleza Rice and Hillary Clinton come right to mind: manly girls (the behavioural entendre overides the physiological for the metaphor to work). It may just be that in nature, referring to other mammals (and even vertebrates like chickens) and so-called primitives, there were few if any metaphoric balls despite the prevalence of warrior spirit irrespective of gender. We are immediately referred for correction to the "pecking order of chickens", "rutting elk violently competing over property rights to the does", the "alpha gorilla" and human "headman/strongman" as "facts" derived from our own myth-time and proven by academic science.

Well, I've spent 40 years as a nomad-peasant only recently retired to a town-like existence (the only justification for cities and towns is retiring or resorting, in my opinion), and can say I've never personally witnessed any of these outside of colloquial imagination, mainstream media and scientific treatise funded by Rockefeller, the Geographic Society or Disney (sibling corporations who share parentage with the History and Discovery channels and cousinage to the BBC) or religious organizations like the catholic as well as lutheran church.

First off, there is no pecking order of chickens outside of artificial environments or, among free-ranging varieties, raised in conditions mimicking the human, conditions of scarcity and overcrowding replacing the food rationing among the confined. Grounds for the dismissal of that idea of pecking order is easily witnessed when there is no imposed scarcity in the interest of increased profits for chicken farmers, as well as direct observation (outside of manipulated lab conditions) of wild fowl.

Most humans seem to prefer the "authority" of tradition over brute force, at least until custom becomes a shackle, when innovation is actually encouraged. That would be before the application of valium (or today, ativan) and the institution of democratic sacrifice, aka "political correctness" and in scientific, religious and geopolitical circles, the grand unification theory. It's a ring of power. Hegemony. And to think we were worried about the dumbing down connection between matrimony and maternally inherited money or munitions to protect the patriarchal municipality made possible with contained marriage units insuring the preservation of future workers and their bosses close to home!

But what of more easily gendered mammals? Elk and deer in the wild or sheep and goats on the range? First off, rough and tumble play is easily confused with violent display. Like judo, which is more properly a dance than a martial art (but useful should one be attacked by a thuggishly warted hog), players are very often equivalently matched, which is to say, adolescent age-mates. Should the play turn into antagonistic competition and the alpha male is nearby (we label them Alpha because of a perceived ferocity or largeness of appearance, and most often, the animals involved would agree with our assessment) like a Sensei, bull elk or a gorilla 'headman' will put a stop to it (assuming both don't become mutually exhausted), often with a mere "eye", a look that inspires fear in one and all. Such a master at simple gesture has only mastered the reduction of his own effort. Should a victor appear in the "contest" unimpeded by onlooking elders, he will attempt to look for someone more adept to play with rather than pursue the exhausted former opponent. If a sort of thuggish attitude persists, it is soon given the important lesson of humility (even sheep understand the notion of bigger fish in the ocean).

Meanwhile in all this fracas, the animal least assessed by Herbert Spencer or Sir Thomas Huxley as "fit" is off having sex with all the estrus females. I knew a free-ranging goat named Gimpy (he was three legged) who couldn't keep up with any of the boys yet fathered most of several generations of kids and eventually died of ripe old-age. No one fucked with him or they'd have caught hell from grandma. The moral of this story, of course, is that it's hard enough to know our own "real" motives for much of our behaviour to proceed to assume a motivation in others, particularly when the eyes never move from the mirror held to our face. My answer to both the food-pyramid and the food-chain is "Have you forgotten the worms, beetles and necrophilic microbes who crawl in and crawl out once the formaldehyde wears off?" And to the dominating hierarchy, "have you ever considered that the alpha position in every other case but yours might just be a force-field of preventive anti-dominance?"

This seems to me to be another source of empirical data to support the hypothesis (or reject the affirmative null-hypothesis) that civil ideology has it, not just backwards (a mere dialectic assessment) but wrong-side out and twisted like a mobius strip. The safest stand is, of course, to deny final truth altogether and allow suggestion to supersede demand and personal experience (your own or someone who's been there) to supersede dogma, and provisional contingency to supersede the permanent institution, be it marriage or academia.

– see The Painful Truth

IPLD Phase Two: Cultural Narrative

One might be hard-pressed nowadays to find a serious objection to the idea that even academic social science does not view the world through the lens of its own culture and pre-established historical narratives. This is how the narrative is reproduced and pushed forward in an increasingly apparent coherence. Contradictions are synthesized, rectified (a matter of trimming away the edges) or outright excluded as statistical anomalies or flawed observation (labeled "pseudo-" or "bad-science") if remembered, and buried without ceremony if not, the very (mechanical) function of cultural amnesia.

What is left is taken and granted unquestionable truth value. Not of course, consciously like a medieval theological think-tank in Istanbul working out new editions of religious dogma or a modern (media) advertising firm (Madison Avenue/Hollywood) in the interest of public relations (well, ok – in some cases they're the same), but subliminally rendered beneath awareness as basic assumptions and not even necessary to disclose in initiating logical formulations. Franz Boas said as much in 1911. It's an hypothesis very difficult to disprove. The easily witnessed phenomenon of truth-value colloquially entailed (or operationally defined and established in non-colloquial milieus) within a word itself as a definite sign pointing to a single definite external counterpart (prosaic or Saussurean, tit-for-tat language) means the assumption need not even reside in a particular unconscious to be found agreeable (make "perfect" sense) on first exposure. In extremely coherent systems, the narrative itself generates the assumption, or at least proves it should it ever come up in discourse.

Such a word is "dominant male" or a male with the more intellectually sounding adjective "alpha". The first expresses the top of a hierarchy, the second the initiator of a linear sequence. They are otherwise considered synonyms and almost infinitely interchangeable largely because both establish a natural precedent to political-economic leadership. Alpha is a bit kinder adjective as it may only refer to a particular culture-hero from myth-time "remembered" as an ancestor (the furthest 'back' a cultural narrative can or is willing to go). Such heroes are not always gender-specific as it may only be a metaphoric personification of a group somewhat on analogy to the anthropomorphic claim of a totem animal (clan reference) to the "originating" group or family line. Unfortunately poetry is absent in nearly all varieties of plain-speak and the association with dominance has already been well established after millennia of civil discourse.

It is important to note the word "civil" here because colloquial and academic knowledge of "nature" has largely been accumulated by those self-confined to civil/city fortresses. "Rural", "peasant", "country" are made words for "uninformed", "vulgar", "sub-existence" (euphamised "subsistence"). The rurally situated college town is a miniature enclave of the city whose civil walls can be seen on the map as the boundaries of the campus. Outside the walls is the service industry. Beyond that (the family farm) there be dragons (aka "nasty, brutish and short").

Hierarchical structure is prefigured by the process of narrowing or constricting one's perceptual horizon. The idea that the electronic interweb expands that horizon with a broader band of communicative potential is contradicted by the ranking and linking system built into it, not unlike the citation of "hero-experts" in academic or political discourse gives emotional credence to one's ideas. Even the word "mirror" refers more to internet identity (read "identicality") than that reflective surface hanging in the bathroom. The radically different is rendered to obscurity and is only accessed by word of mouth (oral tradition) or random drawing (divination) or accident (fortune, chance).

Fortunately, within every institution as well as without them, even in the academic institution, an environment which is set up to minimise or transform one's identity, reside learning-disabled, fringe or reactionary elements, albeit a minority but difficult to eradicate even when identified. John Moore might have called them "uncontrollables". A spirit may be broken or body disacredited, but their presence (essence?) is never eliminated. One can only think there are enduring cracks in every system providing niches for bugs and gremlins. Defined as a disorder by one and all, it is impossible to predict its origin along logical lines, including class lines. I give, for example, the prince, Pete Kropotkin, the intellectual who helped bring down consanguineal aristocracy after spending forty days and nights on the tundra and still proceeds to influence the attack on the bourgeois establishment as well as Darwinian (imperial/free-market) truths ensconced within biology and social psychology.

We may be winning the assault on ideological paradigms (they're all beginning to crumble, even long-held revolutionary ones), even if we have yet to attack the state apparatus which is it's temple. Anarcho-sympathizers are still banging on the gates of the Ivory tower to gain access to the "right answers", if only as an attempt to get out of the folk's house in an effort to delay entrance into the job market, which is increasingly "not there" anyway. Students are still striking for lower tuition to facilitate their success in the institution itself. Their old friends back home might suggest following Rimbaud's advice to make the strike permanent, but to little avail because that would suggest work as the only alternative: "it takes money to fund an insurrection". Well, I'm sorry they can't themselves wiggle free of their aristotelean commitments just yet. Many are already saying "It's coming".

– see Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses by Louis Althuser

IPLD End of Phase One

So how much longer are we to confuse the force [sic] of attraction with the sick attraction to force?