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

Friday, December 28, 2012

The Smooth Transition & the Conservative Instinct

Just like the virtual ownership and distribution of a flailing appendage or a brief facial grimace at a wood-tick with his head buried in your scrotum, it may very well be that the authority of rampant property is a mere postcard confused with the landscape – it's often beside the point (or behind it).
Old Wives' Tale

Kublai Khan liberated the Chinese from both their own tyrannic government AND from Big Daddy's barbarian horde intent on razing it to the ground. It's been the same story since well before Apollo the Apostle offed his own dad, Zeus (still hanging on a cross in oblivion) for the benefit of disgruntled Greeks everywhere (except, of course, the Dionysians). Mao wasn't the last to sign off the revolution in the interest of a smooth transition (humanitarian, I'm sure), paying off corporate bureaucrats 'til the time they're no longer needed. Every Union negotiator does the same, especially when handed a pitchfork and a train ticket to the nearest livery stable in the country-side for some brief R&R. It would seem that, while everyone is up for a radical change, no one wants to notice should it come along. This must be why even the most liberal progressives remain politically conservative once they take hold the reigns and kick their gueldings in the kidneys.

Since the Iron Age and aside from Ghengis and his crew, our era is among the first to witness rising numbers of people doing a work-around on that conservative instinct, calling for the rough over the smooth. The word gaining ground since the nineties is "rupture". They tried to revive the civil war sentiment in the interest of an us-against-them dialectic, but folks seem hip to the idea that even a fully automatic AK-47 with a thirty round clip would be no match for an F-16 or "drone" bomber, especially when the ensuing explosion is written off as another natural gas disaster negating any accrual of martyr value.

Revolution is definitely out, since we've come to notice it's always been just a polite way of saying "reform" like an electric blanket in the Alaskan Bush. The point is, when you're being drug to the bottom by a giant squid, the only things left in Captain Nemo's bag of tricks are the thrust ahead by rip and tear after an electro-shock to the hull. It's very hard to consider this an expression of any will to destruction or escalating death wish: in the midst of a real disaster, peace and violence are even meaningless as talking points. Anything which precludes your own mortality at the bottom of the proverbial drink is the most conservative expression one can make. Did you notice that "the will to live" has been all but erased from the dictionary?

"We can at least take one thing for granted about our era: it - the era - will not rot in peace.

...What's the point of their new, high-yield investment in doom-saying, as they paint their black canvases with images of hypothetical disaster, and hold their alarmist discussions on the subject of these problems that the atomized populace has no way of confronting by direct action? They intend to hide the real disaster, which one doesn't need to be a physician, climatologist or demographer to articulate. Everyone can see the constant impoverishment of the world of men by the modern economy, which develops only at the expense of Life: it destroys the biological bases of life with its devastating power; it submits all social space-time to the policing required for its proper functioning; substitutes for every once commonly accessible reality an ersatz reality whose residual authenticity content is proportional to its price"

Reification & Tragedy
"we really ought to free ourselves from the misleading significance of words!"

Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
'T is the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur, — you're straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.

By reification, I mean any or all of the following:

  • to attatch an absolute or only mildly relative value to a particular significatum which excludes other possibilities 'before' they come into focus, suggestive that the category or class has prior claims on 'reality' over its content or members;
  • to establish an identity between a significatum and the metaphor we use to bespeak it, thus creating a "dead metaphor";
  • to think of a process, experience or activity as if it were a "thing";
  • to confuse "subject-matter" (of discourse) with material object;
  • a matter of thingifying and arithmeticizing the universe, bringing it to a standstill, extinguishing meaningful possibility in favour of 'blind' convention, yet not by intention.

    It can take years of training as well as proceed from an immediate loss of interest.

    SO, EXCELLENCY, AFTER FIFTY YEARS, HOW GOES THE WAR ON POVERTY?

    "...After such a cheerful commencement, a serious word would fain be heard; it appeals to the most serious minds. Take care, ye philosophers and friends of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom! Of suffering "for the truth's sake"! even in your own defense! It spoils all the innocence and fine neutrality of your conscience; it makes you headstrong against objections and red rags; it stupefies, animalizes, and brutalizes, when in the struggle with danger, slander, suspicion, expulsion, and even worse consequences of enmity, ye have at last to play your last card as protectors of truth upon earth—as though "the Truth" were such an innocent and incompetent creature as to require protectors! and you of all people, ye knights of the sorrowful countenance, Messrs Loafers and Cobweb-spinners of the spirit! Finally, ye know sufficiently well that it cannot be of any consequence if YE just carry your point; ye know that hitherto no philosopher has carried his point, and that there might be a more laudable truthfulness in every little interrogative mark which you place after your special words and favourite doctrines (and occasionally after yourselves) than in all the solemn pantomime and trumping games before accusers and law-courts! Rather go out of the way! Flee into concealment! And have your masks and your ruses, that ye may be mistaken for what you are, or somewhat feared! And pray, don't forget the garden, the garden with golden trellis-work! And have people around you who are as a garden—or as music on the waters at eventide, when already the day becomes a memory. Choose the good solitude, the free, wanton, lightsome solitude, which also gives you the right still to remain good in any sense whatsoever! How poisonous, how crafty, how bad, does every long war make one, which cannot be waged openly by means of force! How personal does a long fear make one, a long watching of enemies, of possible enemies! These pariahs of society, these long-pursued, badly-persecuted ones—also the compulsory recluses, the Spinozas or Giordano Brunos—always become in the end, even under the most intellectual masquerade, and perhaps without being themselves aware of it, refined vengeance-seekers and poison-Brewers (just lay bare the foundation of Spinoza's ethics and theology!), not to speak of the stupidity of moral indignation, which is the unfailing sign in a philosopher that the sense of philosophical humour has left him. The martyrdom of the philosopher, his "sacrifice for the sake of truth," forces into the light whatever of the agitator and actor lurks in him; and if one has hitherto contemplated him only with artistic curiosity, with regard to many a philosopher it is easy to understand the dangerous desire to see him also in his deterioration (deteriorated into a "martyr," into a stage-and-tribune-bawler). Only, that it is necessary with such a desire to be clear what spectacle one will see in any case—merely a satyric play, merely an epilogue farce, merely the continued proof that the long, real tragedy is at an end, supposing that every philosophy has been a long tragedy in its origin.

    ...The great epochs of our life are at the points when we gain courage to rebaptize our badness as the best in us."

  • Tuesday, December 25, 2012

    Catastrophe and Implosion

    "The “fiscal cliff” crisis is an artificial emergency, put in place last year as part of the bipartisan deal to raise the federal debt limit. Its purpose is to create a crisis atmosphere and facilitate the passage of rightwing measures that are opposed by the overwhelming majority of the American people.

    The entire framework of the budget debate is reactionary and false. It is based on the lie that “there is no money” for vital social programs, even as trillions are made available to the banks and the military, and corporate profits and the personal fortunes of the ruling elite reach new heights. Its unstated premise is that the wealth of the financial aristocracy is inviolable, while the social needs of working people are expendable."
    Barry Grey, Obama, Boehner pledge to continue talks on social cuts

    "...Possibilities of resistance arise around the issue of implosion. The system insulates itself against crisis by resisting explosion. It converts the explosive force of crisis into a homeopathic dose of simulated catastrophe. Against this constant drip-feed of simulated catastrophe, Baudrillard suggests, the only means of mitigation is to make a real catastrophe arrive. This is perhaps why events like Hurricane Katrina are almost euphoric for some survivors, though traumatic for others. Disaster unties the knots of anxiety and terror in which people are caught. This is also why terrorism is so fascinating. Real violence makes the invisible violence of security disappear.

    According to Baudrillard, power is collapsing. Institutions and “the social” are collapsing. Implosive events take this process further, speeding it up. They are necessarily incalculable in terms of their effects. The endpoint of this process is catastrophe. For Baudrillard, catastrophe is the abolition of causes and the creation of ‘pure, non-referential connections’. Such connections are inherently beautiful and seductive. Catastrophe is not necessarily disastrous as is usually assumed. It is a disaster only for meaning and power.

    Implosion offers possibilities because of the generalisation of the remainder. When the system becomes saturated, everything turns to and becomes the remainder. The remainder – what is barred – continues to exist. Because the system has claimed to be everything, it comes back inside and shatters the system. This may be why the system now imagines itself under siege from enemies within. Without the imaginary, without a space beyond the system’s coded functioning, it can no longer keep what it excludes outside. He suggests, for instance, that architects could form a conception of cities based on their remainders, such as cemeteries and waste grounds. Such an act would be fatal to architecture.

    It is thus on the remainder that a new intelligibility is founded. For instance, sanity is refounded on the basis of madness (the theory of the unconscious). Metropolitan societies exclude the indigenous, only to find the indigenous at their foundation (urban ‘tribes’, gangs, subcultures…) Death is excluded, only to be seen or foreshadowed everywhere. Structures become unstable because the remainder is no longer in a specified place. It is everywhere. When everything is repressed or alienated, the entire field is repressed or alienated – so nothing is repressed or alienated, everything is within the visible field. Repressed energy is no longer available to be channelled by the system.

    The totalising nature of power today makes it more vulnerable than ever. The more total the system seems, the more inspiring any little setback for it becomes. Every small defeat now carries the image of a chain reaction bringing down the system. Baudrillard proposes a strategy of forcing power to occupy its own place, so as to make itself obscene. By making power appear as power, its absence is made visible, and it disappears."

    Thursday, December 6, 2012

    How malicious philosophers can be!

    "The eagerness and subtlety, I should even say craftiness, with which the problem of "the real and the apparent world" is dealt with at present throughout Europe, furnishes food for thought and attention; and he who hears only a "Will to Truth" in the background, and nothing else, cannot certainly boast of the sharpest ears. In rare and isolated cases, it may really have happened that such a Will to Truth—a certain extravagant and adventurous pluck, a metaphysician's ambition of the forlorn hope—has participated therein: that which in the end always prefers a handful of "certainty" to a whole cartload of beautiful possibilities; there may even be puritanical fanatics of conscience, who prefer to put their last trust in a sure nothing, rather than in an uncertain something. But that is Nihilism, and the sign of a despairing, mortally wearied soul, notwithstanding the courageous bearing such a virtue may display. It seems, however, to be otherwise with stronger and livelier thinkers who are still eager for life. In that they side AGAINST appearance, and speak superciliously of "perspective," in that they rank the credibility of their own bodies about as low as the credibility of the ocular evidence that "the earth stands still," and thus, apparently, allowing with complacency their securest possession to escape (for what does one at present believe in more firmly than in one's body?),—who knows if they are not really trying to win back something which was formerly an even securer possession, something of the old domain of the faith of former times, perhaps the "immortal soul," perhaps "the old God," in short, ideas by which they could live better, that is to say, more vigorously and more joyously, than by "modern ideas"? There is DISTRUST of these modern ideas in this mode of looking at things, a disbelief in all that has been constructed yesterday and today; there is perhaps some slight admixture of satiety and scorn, which can no longer endure the BRIC-A-BRAC of ideas of the most varied origin, such as so-called Positivism at present throws on the market; a disgust of the more refined taste at the village-fair motleyness and patchiness of all these reality-philosophasters, in whom there is nothing either new or true, except this motleyness. Therein it seems to me that we should agree with those skeptical anti-realists and knowledge-microscopists of the present day; their instinct, which repels them from MODERN reality, is unrefuted... what do their retrograde by-paths concern us! The main thing about them is NOT that they wish to go "back," but that they wish to get AWAY therefrom. A little MORE strength, swing, courage, and artistic power, and they would be OFF—and not back!"

    Monday, December 3, 2012

    Four More Synchronicities:
    "one revolts first and foremost because words are insufficient"

    The passions spoke first; and men began to act in the right direction before they had reasoned out their action. The wanton cruelty with which political prisoners were treated, the horrors of preliminary detention, the barbarous punishment inflicted for trifling offences - all this proved unendurable even to the mild, patient Russians. The spirit of revenge was kindled, giving birth to the first attacks upon the Government, known by the name of terrorism. They began with an act of individual retaliation which, in the circumstances, had all the dignity of a solemn act of public justice. A girl, Vera Zassulitch, shot General Trepoff, who had ordered the flogging of a political prisoner. On March 31, 1878, she was acquitted by the jury, though she never denied her act. In 1878 terrorism was accepted as a system of warfare by the most influential and energetic section of Russian revolutionists grouped around the paper Zemlia i Volia ("Land and Liberty"). But at first this practical struggle with political despotism was carried on under the banner of political non-interference. "The question of constitution does not interest us," said the terrorists of this epoch in their pamphlet and in their paper, Zemlia i Volia; "the essential part of our activity is propaganda among the people. In striking the worst of the officials we intend merely to protect our companions from the worst treatment by the Government and its agents. The terrorists must be looked upon as a small detachment protecting the bulk of an army at some dangerous passage."
    Sergius Stepniak

    1: Decolonize the Operating system

    "They were upright and correct without knowing that to be so was righteous. They loved one another without knowing that to do so was benevolence. They were sincere without knowing that to do so was loyalty. They kept their promises without knowing that to do so was to be in good faith. They helped one another without thought of giving or receiving gifts. Thus their actions left no trace and we have no records of their affairs" – Chuang Tzu

    "Anarchism [as opposed to 'protests by anarchists' trying to lift off hierarchical structure and make more space for anarchism] is about invisible harmonies. It is ‘free association’ and it permeates our society in spite of hierarchical ethics and institutions. If you want to see it by ‘subtracting it out’ then you would ‘work to rule’ and remove all those natural, spontaneous, free associating moves that are the real heartbeat of social organization. Things would look very different if everyone did no more than execute, literally, instructions cascading down the 'chain of command'. In many cases the people above don't even know what the people below do or what challenges they are faced with...

    If one takes a leaf from the book of ‘de-colonization’, anarchism is constituted by a ‘letting go’ of the notion of an ‘operating system’ which governs ‘how things work’, and not in devising a ‘new operating system’.

    In a decolonizing system, what is needed is a return to a natural‘values system’; a values system that doesn’t believe in the need for ‘a new operating system’ or a new ‘political economy’, that orients to ‘how things works’ and to making them work in ‘correct manner’, as provided within the framework of the ‘sovereign states’ which may be hierarchically ranked on a better/worse performance scale;

    ...The decolonizer ‘values system’ does not start from a new American dream or a new French dream or a new EU dream which are theory-driven [common dream-driven aka common belief-driven] ‘operating systems’ governing ‘how things work’, ... the decolonizer values start from different assumptions; i.e. that we live in a relational space wherein we cannot isolate ‘how things work’ from the dynamics of the common habitat these things share inclusion in, whether we are talking at the level of individual people or individual sovereign states.

    The decolonizer ‘values system’ orients to the beyond good-and-evil quest for cultivating, restoring and sustaining balance and harmony in the relational space we share inclusion in. It is a values system that transcends the moral values-based governance of common-belief driven ‘operating systems’ that describe the correct way for ‘how things work’ and the incorrect way for ‘how things work’, so as to ‘realize’ a common belief based ‘vision’ or ‘dream’. Evolution is not heading towards a particular ‘end-vision’; it is an unfolding [a continual transforming of relational space] whose forms/shapes arise from the quest for sustaining balance within an interdependent connectedness.

    This is the way of nature; i.e nature is continual ‘organizING’ that does not allow ‘ego’ to get narcissist about an ‘organizING’, notionally creating an ‘organizATION’ driven from some ‘common belief’ or ‘common dream’, and establishing ‘dream-police’ to enforce dream-convergent behaviours on all of the participants with ‘the organizATION’.

    The anarchism in decolonization is by way of values that suspend this reifying of balance-and-harmony-sustaining ‘organizINGs’ into ‘common-belief driven local organizATIONs’ [the latter being ‘genomes’ that have cast aside their ‘epigenomes’. Without the 'epigenome' the 'genome' becomes an internally directed 'mechanistic organizATION'. With the 'epigenome', which ensures continuing resonance between the dynamics of the relational spatial-plenum and the dynamics of the diverse multiplicity of inhabitants of that plenum, interdependent connectedness is acknowledged."

    emile

    2: Southern Hospitality (Apache style) is no friggin' joke!

    "Since the hardening of White supremacist cultural norms in the 18th century, it has always required a level of violent rupture for White, Black, and Native rebels to actually find themselves side by side in true affinity.

    This is true of the aforementioned stockade wars in Tennessee, of the long history of maroon rebellion along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, of early slave rebellions alongside Irish indentured servants, of those conflicts like the Lowry Wars, of early labor battles, and of later prison riots, just to name a few. Obviously this is not to say that the reverse is true, that violence of any kind automatically creates the conditions to break down racial hierarchies. Yet for actors of various racial privileges and disadvantages to find themselves in true affinity requires a rebellion whose content is somehow fundamental to the nature of our society, and such rebellion will always be violent. The progressive view tends to abhor this reality in favor of a perspective that freedom is something which comes over time, rather than an experience we immediately create for ourselves as we rebel together against those who would oppress and exploit us. When historians reflexively fall back on this progressive way of understanding history, they often have to ignore much of what is right in front of them. How else could entire armies of Left academics and politicians sincerely portray the Republican Party in the South as a well-intentioned but tragic attempt at racial equality, or the mass theft of plantation property as aimed at securing "rights" for Indians rather than what it clearly (albeit temporarily) resulted in – immediately communist relationships of black and brown people? For a historian to use the political discourse of one who is at peace with State and Capital to explain away the motives of those who were at war with these systems, represents to us an extreme kind of intellectual dishonesty and theoretical laziness.

    Anarchists can also be guilty of this. All too often our own struggles make the same mistake, using the discourse and frameworks provided to us by our enemies with little examination. Civil and workers' "rights," "amnesty" for immigrants, economic and social "justice," an end to police "brutality" – the words we use about the problems we face say something about our position towards the society that gives us these problems in the first place. Rights discourse, this concept of "justice," the idea that police could be anything but brutal – framing solutions in this way only make conceptual sense if we plan to stay inside this world we currently inhabit. They both reflect and reinforce a constrained imagination towards what is possible. Anarchist history should be about discovering or recovering those moments when something entirely different emerged on the scene, to help us expand our imagination and ability to describe such moments in their own terms rather than in those of our enemies. Such history should work to grow our sense of joy and wonder at the possibilities implied in rebellion, and our appreciation and sense of heritage for those who came before us."

    The Lowry Wars: attacking North Carolina's plantation society in the age of Reconstruction.

    3: "The universal hypocrisy of modern society", or was it just a mirage?

    "In one of Edgar Allen Poe's tales he recounts how a little group of wrecked seafarers on a water logged vessel, at the last extremity of starvation, are suddenly made delirious with joy at seeing a sail approaching them. As she came near them she seemed to be managed strangely and unseamanly as though she were scarcely steered at all, but come near she did, and their joy was too great for them to think much of this anomaly. At last they saw the seamen on board of her, and noted one in the bows especially who seemed to be looking at them with great curiosity, nodding also as though encouraging them to have patience, and smiling at them constantly, showing as he did so a set of very white teeth, and apparently so anxious for their safety that he did not notice that the red cap that he had on his head was falling into the water.

    All of a sudden, as the vessel neared them, and while their hearts were leaping with joy at their now certain deliverance, an inconceivable and horrible stench was wafted to them across the waters, and presently to their horror and misery they saw that this was a ship of the dead, the bowing man was a tottering corpse, his red cap a piece of his flesh torn from him by a sea fowl; his amicable smile was caused by his jaws, denuded of the flesh, showing his white teeth set in a perpetual grin. So passed the ship of the dead into the landless ocean, leaving the poor wretches to their despair.

    To us Socialists this Ship of the Dead is an image of the civilisation of our epoch, as the cast away mariners are of the hopes of the humanity entangled in it. The cheerfully bowing man, whose signs of encouragement and good feeling turn out to be the results of death and corruption, well betokens to us the much be praised philanthropy of the rich and refined classes of our Society, which is born of the misery necessary to their very existence. How do people note eagerly, like Arthur Gordon Pym and his luckless fellows, the beautiful hope of the softening of life by the cultivation of good feeling, kindness, and gratitude between rich and poor, with its external manifestations; its missionary enterprises at home and abroad hospitals, churches, refuges, and the like; its hard working clergy dwelling amidst the wretched homes of those whose souls they are saving; its elegant and enthusiastic ladies sometimes visiting them; its dignified, cultivated gentlemen from the universities spreading the influences of a refined home in every dull half starved parish in England; the thoughtful series of lectures on that virtue of thrift which the poor can scarcely fail to practise even unpreached to; its increasing sense of the value of moral purity among those whose surroundings forbid them to understand even the meaning of physical purity; its scent of indecency in Literature and Art, which would prevent the publication of any book written out of England or before the middle of the 19th century, and would reduce painting and sculpture to the production of petticoated dolls without bodies. All this, which seems so refined and humane, is but the effect of the distant view of the fleshless grinning skull of civilisation seeming to offer an escape to the helpless castaways, but destined on its nearer approach to suffocate them with the stench of its corruption, and then to vanish aimlessly into the void, leaving them weltering on the ocean of life which its false hope has rendered more dreadful than before.

    ...Yet even now it is necessary that a certain code of morality should be supposed to exist and to have some relation to the religion which, being the creation of another age, has now become a sham. With this sham moreover its accompanying morality is also steeped, although it has a use as serving for a cover of a morality really the birth of the present condition of things, and this is clung to with a determination or even ferocity natural enough, since its aim is the perpetuation of individual property in wealth, in workman, in wife, in child.

    The so called morality of the present age is simply commercial necessity, masquerading in the forms of the Christian ethics: for instance, commercial honour is merely the code necessitated the by needs of men in commercial relations which without it could not subsist, and which has found nothing in common with the Christian "do unto others as thou wouldst," etc., maxim, in the name of which it is on occasion invoked. The only connection that current commercial ethics has with the Christian is, as we said above, a purely formal one. The mystical individualist ethics of Christianity, which had for its supreme end another world and spiritual salvation therein, has been transformed into an individualist ethic having for its supreme end (tacitly, if not avowedly), the material salvation of the individual in the commercial battle of this world. This is illustrated by a predominance amongst the commercial classes of a debased Calvinistic theology, termed Evangelicalism, which is the only form of religion these classes can understand, the poetico-mystical element in the earlier Christianity being eliminated therefrom, and the "natural laws" of profit and loss, and the devil take the hindmost, which dominate this carnal world, being as nearly as possible reproduced into the spiritual world of its conception."

    William Morris & Belfort Bax, Socialism, from the root up

    4: Black Bloc

    "It is also what is left in the hands of our discontent, at the stage of society we have reached, despite ourselves: the impossibility of marching together while shouting out phrases so that they can be heard, the incapacity to engage in indirect and representative actions, the urgent need to unload one-thousandth of the cruelty the State, money, and advertisements inject in all our veins every day.

    The category black bloc doesn’t designate anything or anyone, or more precisely, maybe it designates anyone as such. A distinctive feature of one who finds themselves in what we call a black bloc is to demand nothing for themselves or for others, to cut across public space without being subjected to it for once, to disappear in a mass that has at last come together in places that are not office or factory exits and public transportation at rush hour. Rampant hypocrisy makes us associate the black bloc with a specific and organized entity—like Sony, Vivendi, or Total Fina—and this same hypocrisy considers as “crimes” the minor damage that the desire for willful indistinctness leaves behind when it takes the form of a spontaneous demonstration.

    In this night where all demonstrators look alike there is no point in posing Manichean questions. Especially since we know that the distinction between guilty and innocent no longer matters, all that counts is the one between winners and losers. Punishment always lands on the latter, not because they deserve it but because somebody has to be repressed. Trying to figure out if someone has infiltrated a black bloc is like trying to know the extent to which rain infiltrates a river, a lake, or seawater.

    ...Putting insurrections into words has simply turned into a not very attractive task. For one revolts first and foremost because words are insufficient."

    Claire Fontaine, This is not the Black Bloc

    Sunday, December 2, 2012

    More Fetish:

    "The sea is beautiful; looking at it, we never think of being dissatisfied with it, aesthetically. But not everyone lives near the sea; many people never in their lives get a chance to see it. Yet they would very much like to see it, and consequently seascapes please and interest them. Of course, it would be much better to see the sea itself rather than pictures of it; but when a good thing is not available, a man is satisfied with an inferior one. When the genuine article is not present, a substitute will do. Even the people who can admire the real sea cannot always do so when they want to, and so they call up memories of it. But man’s imagination is weak; it needs support and prompting. So to revive their memories of the sea, to see it more vividly in their imagination, they look at seascapes. This is the sole aim and object of very many (the majority of) works of art: to give those people who have not been able to enjoy beauty in reality the opportunity to acquaint themselves with it at least to some degree; to serve as a reminder, to prompt and revive memories of beauty in reality in the minds of those people who are acquainted with it by experience and love to recall it..."

    Nicholas G. Chernyshevsky
    (but see Cool World, perhaps it's already here?)

    Or perhaps a fetish is like an enzyme, literally, that walking, talking, smoking and drinking, live being which metamorphoses the sludge in the stomach vat into wonderful tidbitts for all the little people on the inside? Or is it, perhaps, whatever it is, that glint in the eye of a lizard which transmits letters of introduction to both fragrance and image, right there in the middle of the dance floor? Consciousness itself might just be a dance of metaphors. What's the matter, is it alive?

    “A work of art strives for the harmony of idea and image” no more and no less than does the shoemaker’s craft, the jeweler’s craft, calligraphy, engineering, moral resolve. “All work should be done well” – such is the meaning of the phrase “harmony between idea and image." (ibid)

    I would more rather say "harmonic" and even more importantly (especially for the enzyme), "generative". Without the ripples, the entendre itself disappears back into the pit. As they say, the more the merrier, and that creates movement, if only a lizard snapping at a fly. And what is a legless lizard anyway but a snake, and no gutless wonder at that! What is not beautiful is still natural, especially when it bites, and that's the beauty of it.

    For Chernyshevsky, love is an enzyme – "the base to which everything else is tied with Gordian knots; without it everything loses coherence and meaning." I call it "Sativa". But without the occasional monster, we're reduced to a lump of romantics, and then, where's a movement to go but to the work camp or toilet? Sometimes the enzyme is just fun, and that can reproduce paisley, just for the hell of it. To capture an essence, one must always refer to the context, as there is no owning an object outside of hell – who'd want to? As commentaries and audience, the Doodles are the real artists in Cool World, which only goes to show, there's always a critic waiting to fall from the attic like a bank vault or attack in the Fall like a pen sucking ink.

    On the other hand, there's Henry Thomas Buckle for a good game of chess.

    And then there's Sergius Stepniak on Nihilism and Narodnichestvo,`
    Stepniak's bio
    and Historical Nihilism.