Like Ulyses, Poe's tyrant Tamerlane discovered way too late that the future's not what you've bought and paid for, not by any means of currency or blood. It's bad enough expecting much from our commodities, one must also be careful what you wish for. Like product quality, and given the morality of efficiency, repulsive dystopias are just easier to design, construct and defend. Without a destination in mind which may require more than cognitive maps, utopia is just a direction, anything but here is out. Like in grade school I watched the clock to hurry up and get to three. It's just a turning point and not a compass.
Like major depression, mediatic education can only claim a victory as bloody as Odysseus' slaughter if one comes to see outside the pit of eternal stench, the air is even fouler. Maybe let's not throw out utopia just yet – as long as we remember it's the way and not the product (line or destination) even when the most shocking idea has always been productive termination. Need we be reminded again that taking the journey is everyone's fate and destiny? This is not an invitation to stand still (in line or in formation) to purchase an ounce of immortality. Sustained development is the fuel for a commodity without a shelf-life. That's a utopic destiny called heaven for gods alone – and aging democrats who expect at every whim the world will come to them. And need we be reminded that a haven's just a resting spot or free hotel and not the end? They say that hell is only as hot as you can make it. They also say that should be enough for anyone! As to Tamerlane, who set out to conquer and suppress the world as a gift to his high school sweetheart:
Lend me your ear while I call you a fool.
You were kissed by a witch one night in the wood,
and later insisted your feelings were true.
The witch's promise was coming,
believing he listened while laughing you flew.
Leaves falling red, yellow, brown, all the same,
and the love you have found lay outside in the rain.
Washed clean by the water but nursing its pain.
The witch's promise was coming, and you're looking
elsewhere for your own selfish gain.
Keep looking, keep looking for somewhere to be,
well, you're wasting your time,
they're not stupid like he.
Meanwhile leaves are still falling,
you're too blind to see.
You won't find it easy now, it's only fair.
He was willing to give to you, you didn't care.
You're waiting for more but you've already had your share.
The witch's promise is turning, so don't you wait up
for him, he's going to be late.– Jethro Tull, The Witch's Promise
"The incredible thunderbolt of a propelling idea suddenly surges up from the grey monotony of everyday life. A desire to be beyond the abyss, well beyond it.
...the real movement is rediscovering the explosive potential of utopia. It is acting in such a way that its radical critique of the process of recuperation cannot be recuperated. It is not by chance that this position has appeared at the same time as economic claims are diminishing in importance. There equality was seen as the result of the repartition of produced value beyond the endemic division between capitalists and proletarians. But we are sure that any society that were to pass more or less violently from capitalism to post-revolutionary socialism through the narrow door of syndicalism would necessarily be a grey parody of a free society. The heavy trade union self-regulating mechanism with its ideal of the good worker and the bad skiver would be transferred to society as a whole. The students have faced the problem of the impossibility of any outlet in the labour market. But their analysis strengthens (or should strengthen) the conviction that only with a radically utopian way of seeing the social problem will it be possible to break through the boundaries of a destiny that those in power seem to hold in their hands...
Why, one might ask, are we so sure of the revolutionary content of an idea that, after all, has moved with varying fortunes in the world revolutionary sphere for at least two hundred years? The answer is simple. The propulsive value of a concept cannot be understood in social terms if one limits oneself to examining existing conditions. in fact there is no causal relationship between social conditions and a utopian concept. The latter moves within the real movement and is in deep contrast to the structural limits that condition but do not cause it. In the fictitious movement on the contrary the same concept can move around comfortably. Here in the rarefied atmosphere of the castle of spooks the utopian concept, having lost all its significance, becomes no more than a product of ideology like so many others. Research into the causes of utopia or rather utopian desire could certainly be interesting but would give poor results if one were to limit oneself to the study of the field of the social and historical conditions in which the concept suddenly appears.
For this reason we cannot outline the limits of a presumed operativity of a utopian concept starting from these conditions. It could go well beyond the latter, in other words could itself become an element of social change...
The strength of the utopian concept multiplies to infinity at precisely the moment in which it is proposed, so long as it emerges within the real movement and is not an ideological plaything within the fictitious one."
Battaile called the "real movement" the "intimate order" and is not confined to the fiction department at the local library. Order is isolation and exclusion, which are simply two views on the same process – one from the inside and one from the out. But this only applies to a mechanical universe. A common mistake is to shout the name of chaos at everything unlinear, like apples in eyes and pies in the skies. Intimacy outside the confines of mere proximity points our ears toward affinity, and that must entertain a notion of aesthetics or it's just hear-say or a game of follow the leader or connect the dots, not to put too fine a line on the matter. In artful things, only an aristotle or rockefeller would want to set a standard for everyone else's taste. That really only makes the profit margins more predictable and big.
What is the difference between finite chaos and infinite complexity? In linear terms, it's always where you draw the line. Finite chaos is in the order of a bomb going off or the death of an individual or, in more galactic terms, an epic or a pox-ecliptic, or even epoch-elliptic revelation like a supernova, or big bang as a creative urge, even if always in need of further evidence for any sound determinism. Even capitalists understand a sound investment relies or lies again on some insider information – otherwise it's just a gamble. It wasn't a call for deeper cuts or further articulation when they use to say "seeing is believing", it's just that if you can't trust your senses, why bother with another's?
A mirage is no lie by evil senses, the mistake is just their misinterpretation, sometimes a distortion. If taken as auspicious message of a by-passing phantom, it's still food for thought if not a later-than-expected materially metabolic satisfaction. The line between a taste bud and a spud is always wiggly. The phantom only bids you try it. How else could you know to change direction or keep moving without the curiosity (once called bravery) to engage with what may be only an illusion, wishful thinking or a hearty meal?
Everything's provisional. It's why without the security of a bird in the hand, a free gift must arouse the trust detector. If there's any sense in reductionism, the mammary gland is a give-away for all mammalian babies. Before religious orders, god and darwin, there were no orphans. What's inherited genes or property got to do with anything when every child knows a mother's not only one who satisfies your belly but makes you giggle. A smarmy ass-licker is only interested in excrement or caca. He's a phony. If only to preserve a sense of integrity, even an untrained monkey will call bullshit and hurl, or freely give him what he wishes – sometimes there's room to take the metaphoric quite literally so might refrain from criticising bricks hurling through bank windows. It's not immoral violence like playing with your food or barfing on your shoulder, just some freedom of expression. If malicious, what the devil? it's conditions made them do it! Any way, who's complaining, the glass or the banker?
Data, of course, must refer to sense data or an echo from another receptor which we refer to as literature and tall tails. Or it's a harmony between a sight and what one smells. Beneath the data is ground, making archaeologists and potato farmers and all variety of critics the most suitable scientific fodder by virtue of digging up the dirt. For the dead, it's no great concern but for soon-to-be live beings, it's a premature extraction by an all-to greedy or impatient or conformist (in other words, a sleeping) obstetrician.
Once upon a time phenomenology was the word which said to only trust your senses 'cause the further from that phenomenon called "data", you'll need some stronger lenses. With polytics and other seizures, metaphysics and religion are for the ownership of reality when they ask what underlies the data. That, of course means more theory or systematised ideas and it's the more arrogant among them who proclaim reality is nothing BUT a set of grand ideas, the numbers or go on to invent an absolving god-creator, a tool to absorb them their mundane responsibilities (only meaning here, the ability to dance, that is, respond) and then to take the blame for their cooking the books instead of cattle and thence and then again with much destruction, created poverty.
The christians added heaven as an unearthly reward for intentional starvation and toil in the here and now. Or so said Mark Twain. To this day, even atheists consider reward as just the temporary withholding of punishment and call that humane treatment. Humanity always justifies the ghettos with more humanity. Truant workers call it leave which is the only opportunity to live, as if by someone else's permission, learned early on with the proprietary grammatical distinction between may and can. Life itself has become affixed to utopian idealism when all that's left is a virtual simulation. Fortunately, our ancestors were skeptics when they coined the word "lies" to apply what lives beneath the gods' ideas – beneath the ground the only sounds are heard from corpses. D. H. Lawrence only said reality is only found the other side of Benjamin Franklin's barbed wire fences. In other words, "beauty's coming out of the box" is all was meant by all apocalypses. Shelley said Pandora was a godess for all-giving. The problem wasn't what came out, according to Promethius, but what was missing, and for that he lost his liver and Atlas dropped the ceiling.
As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.
The thing about receivers and emitters is when they resonate or dance together and then you can't tell one from the other, and you shouldn't lest they fall away. An harmonic can ring truer (which in auditory language means beautiful) than either end and everyone with taste or ear for it prefers a good harmony over a monotone or loud cacaphony. So for immersion or participant observers, the real data lies not beneath but amongst or in between them. What makes sense for Goethe is a portrayal of the context, not a systematic explanation or in architectural terms like syntax, an arrangement of its constituents. Olmec Masons understood that leaders are the ones who cut the corners. From the stone's point of view, it's all just falsification of data to fit someone else's scheme to build enclosures. Any good story either resonates with your experience or peaks your curiosity for exploration. That's all. The social agreement is for commisurating retirees always complaining about the youngsters.
“A ‘cause’ (or gene) is something without which some ‘effect’ (or character) which you expect fails to occur, while something else occurs instead. To turn the sum of such negative statements around and fashion from them a positive doctrine of plenipotency (of causes or genes) seems to me a reprehensible somersault of logic.”– paul weiss, 1973
Could it be that the ego is NOT that which is defended, but merely the set of all defenses? To the pure, all things may be pure, but Nietzsche reminds us that to the swine, all things are piggish and Reich adds that underneath the layers of body armor or the masquerade is a bloody mess – nothing pure about it. And by the way, as to those puritans at the nsa, we're laughing – they've learned to do a google search so now have the entire web at their fingertips. Ah the beauty of seduction. A real spider spins a web from its ass – it's the fly which experiences sticky fingers!
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