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?

Keep it together, or the immaterial nonsense in the distinction – arbitrary split between invention, discovery, nature and artifice

When you have a sultry egg and slice it anywhere to produce a separation or divorce, a single slice but clean through and through (crosswise or in that fashion would be two – however well-met at the intersection – two slices at cross purpose doubling the results, to the degree of an exponential insult where, between me and you, one would do) there is born three: the mother-egg (it's not a fire-hydrant no matter how you slice it) and two crescents, cross-sectioned offspring with faces whose similarity is reversed in one sense, and in any other, or by comparison, depends on how you cut the mustard or how thick you spread it.

The scalpel or demi-urge, of course, and excluding for the moment asexually reproducing organisms (we are after-all, on the topic of eggs), stands in for the father, any of which will do, but has some lingering say on matters of appearance and even more-so if motherly (or at least like a kindly uncle), but otherwise is hereafter inconsiderate to our purpose and has no further bearing on the matter unless she invites him back or at a later date another just won't do.

In cell biology, mitosis represents a discontinuity of trangendered mother-father embedded-embodied unity: With the principle of identity one divided by one is two (1/1=2) – if the second one was any other, the result would have been three. In family life, division and addition are co-equivalent, lest there comes along an unforeseen subtraction. Meiosis has no long-term disruption to continuity of the original matter/mother or big picture: 1/1=3(or more); 1+1=3(or more) and then things get sticky until it's time to start over again with a secure sense of prodigality at one end or cantankerous old age at the other.

– Introductory Biology & Counter-Mathematics
(Hardcore, Brace & Bittington, ISBN: 72)

We've been well informed and should by now accept without question that humans have an innate fear of the unknown, at least until it's been accurately quantified. To be sure, the only thing less feared is death. Tomorrow, BBC Science Headline News will report the discovery of the gene responsible for manufacturing the protein actuating universal paranoia. Induction reminds us that this production must come later in development, since every newborn would expire from shock due to instantaneous saturation with unknown variables at birth, or at least shortly thereafter. Even were this debilitating tendency overcome by a more powerful defensive protein to counter the hideous effects of the natural environment impacting the senses, no child would thereafter need be punished for an over-active imagination or curiosity beyond the limits of a recursive tautology. Our own experience suggests otherwise, and inverted logic provides an alternate and more comfortable hypothesis: there may be a ubiquitous fear of a difference of opinion. It can't be a matter of resistance to ambiguity, else neuronal activity would cease and we'd all swoon at every modern inconvenience.

The one immortal truth is that nothing can be discussed without reference to something else, even if unintended: as one thing leads to another, all discourse is metaphoric, and metaphor is the juxtaposition of forms set side by side, hence comparison, hence artificial, hence natural, all at the same time and not indisposingly so. It is an a priori deduction subject to such passioned embitterment its truth-value would best be ignored.

There is a sense of security called trust essential to everyday life (very likely, to any other sort as well). One approaches a chair almost mindlessly. It's name, title and definition are irrelevant if we can set upon the sensory appearance matching up well with any relayed or recalled experience. One rarely questions it or even plans ahead so-as to be certain it will not metamorphose into a dragon's nostril and set fire to your ass. Conversely:

No matter how high and mighty the throne,
what sits on it 's the same as your own!

– Chad Mitchel Trio

When you've seen one ass, you've seen 'em all, or so goes the saying in proctological circles. Inductive reasoning does not lead to knowledge but to decision, that is, action coupled to the sense of psychological security one would wish it accompanied had we only lived in Eutopia. It applies to sticking to a path as well as pealing off it. Right or wrong is inconsequential to the action taken, the criterion or hinge or justification is the sense of calm or excitement or pleasure or relief it brings – it comes bearing gifts so is considered politely correct, even when in the form of a double-dare.

Therefore, there is no immutability to be expected, movement can continue on a transitory, provisional basis, truth is excluded. Investigative consciousness only comes to play after the advance of the unexpected, like the wrong appendage protruding from one's backside. Induction has no concern with the unknown, which is to say is not otherwise curious except when a perturbation seems somehow familiar or reminiscent. The inductive facility steps to the background, incompetent regarding such matters, when the playful poetic sense is called forth if not a second opinion. Suppressing play early-on leads to both morality and political-economy, generating such encyclopædic reams of dogma as to warrant it's own name and title: Modernity. It only rhymes with Maternity like honey to an orbiting cyanide capsule, and the fruit it bears is just as deadly.

If truth exists as is colloquially expected, because each claim differs from or contradicts every other but the nepotistic (where nothing is excluded or defined away just to force an issue, which is to say, "sans politics"), then every interpretation or representation is false, in error or fuzzily indeterminate. If, on the other hand, axiomatic truth is excluded or suspended as itself a dead end, a conversation stopper, a sleep inducer or any other stoppage or provoker of war (a true answer, in its infallible finality is all of these) then each interpretation is appropriate, each performance an act and every utterance is silently preceded with an "as if" as loud as any winking eye. It should be given or even taken that it's only a pretense – education can only ever familiarize one with the current script. It's not like we should take it with us after the show.

As Proudhon once observed, there's nothing supernatural about it: the Absolute is the holy trinity in all of its three-headed aspect: religious, political and economic. The absolute extends its insatiably sticky fingers into everything. It gropes, grabs, grapples, gripes, grumbles, groans, grinds, graduates and grows, all coated with honey to both cover its ass and suck you into it like a fly to a sticky yellow no-pest strip, because the omnipotent has but one limitation: it can't reach to lick its own ass (except metaphorically) without being booed off the stage for an all-too-obvious costume malfunction. How else is it that the greater good is invariably seen walking in the company of a large evil and even a lesser evil is always the preferred champion? Well, as Baudrilard tried to reply discussing the simulacron, instead of no reality hiding behind the present situation, he might have said "there's nothing lower than the slimy truth", and more safely got away. No one likes to hear another dis their mother, not at least without sufficient pay.

Time for "The Legend of Immortal Truth"

Figurative speech is paint by earlobe but not always arriving just in time: Like the form of a mother beating around the bush, "Time" is the metaphoric juxtaposition of recollection with the mathematic ratio of possibility to probability of what does not exist – even as a blueprint – a rational expression impossible to solve without irrational numbers until it has already passed. Hence at one time, the future sneaks up from behind and kicked you in the ass. The literal interpretation of time produces "Truth", an aphoristic affirmation always formless, coming out but occluded by the horizon of one's perception and therefore problematic, whether considering childhood memory or a weather forecast. The past is history (a handy alibi for the present), the future mystery and like fish or an inundated dry creek-bed, with bare hands, the present's too slippery to catch. In the visual realm, time is a comet following an invisible arc (because it's not really there) across the sky, itself followed by an unwagging tail but off at a kilter (because it is there) for all to see, and after a few revolutions, is gone for as many as a thousand years just like an Algerian plague but not always in conspiracy with earth changing catastrophies and insurrections after which we must come up with a new story because the old ones aren't jiving. To any question, the immortal answer is always "Maybe", but then, only figuratively.

Ten million million years and a day have rolled, since these events, away;

but still the peasant at fall of night, belated therenear, is oft affright by sounds of a phantom bear in flight; a breaking of branches under the hill; the noise of a going when all is still! and hens asleep on the perch, they say, cackle sometimes in a startled way, as if they were dreaming a dream that mocks the lope and whiz of a fleeting fox!

Half we're taught, and teach to youth, and praise by rote, is not,

but merely stands for, truth.

So of my goat: she's merely designed to represent the truth—"immortal" to this extent:

dead she may be, and skinned—frappé— hid in a dreadful den away; prey to the churches—(any will do, except the church of me and you.) the simplest miracle, even then, will get her up and about again.

– Ambrose Bierce, Cobwebs

Barnyard Grammar

"I say, you!" bawled a fat ox in a stall to a lusty young ass who was braying outside; "the like of that is not in good taste!"

"In whose good taste, my adipose censor?" inquired the ass, not too respectfully.

"Why—h'm—ah! I mean it does not suit me. You ought to bellow."

"May I inquire how it happens to be any of your business whether I bellow or bray, or do both—or neither?"

"I cannot tell you," answered the critic, shaking his head despondingly; "I do not at all understand it. I can only say that I have been accustomed to censure all discourse that differs from my own."

"Exactly," said the ass; "you have sought to make an art of impertinence by mistaking preferences for principles. In 'taste' you have invented a word incapable of definition, to denote an idea impossible of expression; and by employing in connection therewith the words 'good' and 'bad,' you indicate a merely subjective process in terms of an objective quality. Such presumption transcends the limit of the merely impudent, and passes into the boundless empyrean of pure cheek!"

At the close of this remarkable harangue, the bovine critic was at a loss for language to express his disapproval. So he said the speech was in bad taste. – A. Bierce, 1874

"Pray walk into my parlour," said the spider to the fly. "That is not quite original," the latter made reply. "If that's the way you plagiarize, your fame will be a fib— But I'll walk into your parlour, while I pitch into your crib. But before I cross your threshold, sir, if I may make so free, Pray let me introduce to you my friend, 'the wicked flea.'" "How do you?" says the spider, as his welcome he extends; "'How doth the busy little bee,' and all our other friends?" "Quite well, I think, and quite unchanged," the flea said; "though I learn, In certain quarters well informed, 'tis feared 'the worm will turn.'" "Humph!" said the fly; "I do not understand this talk—not I!" "It is 'classical allusion,'" said the spider to the fly.

– see The Discovery of Writing & Democracy

Moral: An intrusive preposition couplied with an article (see, for example, the distinction between the two imperatives: "Punch the clock to the end of time" and "Punch the clock to end time". The first verb looses its metaphoric ambiguity and the second verb metamorphically actualizes itself from the nominal state. The appropriate substitution would, of course, be: "Punch the clock for the last time" and all three Thesaurian confusions disappear).

Is Spider-grandmother a seductress or is it entrapment?

[Posted in May by Dave on the Synchromesh Transmission]

Au contraire, Pierre, a spider never seduces its dinner. Seduction would not even apply to the Venus Fly-trap, which only indicates an error in judgement on the part of pollenating insects. The web is well-placed alongside another's path, a point of transition, a bottleneck like a Chinook fishtrap or a cop posing as a hooker on a busy downtown intersection where one might expect a bit more authenticity. The extent of the web is the horizon of a spider's perception extending its sensation of a perturbation. The spider still must move to the vibration to enwrap and consume it. It is a joyful noise played on the spider's web of expanded consciousness. If anything, it is the fly which, albeit inadvertently, seduces the spider with an angelic pluck of the harp string! A sublime sound for the spider, a frantic wiggle for the fly.

Seduction, on the other hand, is an invitation for some mutual wiggling and not a matter of consumption at all. It is not, as Baudrillard suggests, a faux appearance for possession; it is merely an expression of receptivity. A faux appearance for possession is a sales pitch to enfavour a commodity exchange. A seductive adornment is merely an expressive emphasis, to attract another's attention, a perturbation within their perceptual horizon. A pleasant surprise. A question of extension by means of a simple redirection where a loud vocal announcement such as "Hey baby, wanna booogie?" may seem inappropriate for the situation.

There is a difference between seduction and entrapment residing in one's motivation. Hell, they don't even rhyme! The confusion is brought on by the posing of equality when we notice matching patterns. When we witness overwhelming entrapment in our own lives, we redirect to that side of the equation as par excellent or primary index of the other. Thus, in the same manner that Baudrillard cannot find an "authentic" gift (he thinks it therefore cannot exist), he says seduction is at base entrapment, jiving with social psychologists who pronounce all communication antagonistic.

Pretty quickly, half the equation disappears altogether by virtue of linear sequencing. Reductionism reduces meaning by shrinking the horizon of perception. It does not annihilate meaning, which is always a potential. From a mechanical point of view, the same muscles are engaged in seduction and entrapment. It is a matter of polysemy which gets the poet in us excited, whereas the mathemetician proclaims identity and "end of discussion". The romantically susceptible has at least a fifty percent chance of error. Over time, our own language illustrates the poetic associations of similarity without demanding linear causality: a tela 'web'; a toile 'sheer fabric'; a toilette 'bag for clothing'; a toilet 'receptacle for shit'; coming full turn back to toilette water 'perfume to cover the stink' and network telecast a 'web of lies' inviting all to serve themselves another helping of, more toil. That once just meant "the way we weave our baskets".

An after thought: By insisting on clarity, linearity and unvarying precision, mathematical distinction (definition always being a process of exclusion of what never really goes away – we just proceed to ignore it), we're set up for confusion. Consider how, to this day, we mix up the social with the political – I'm sorry, in my book they're not equivalent nor in adjectival relation (except as one negates the other) and maybe that's why they'll always be at war. Self-fulfillingly prophetic, the victories and the victims always rekindle the political (that's as well to say the economic) and everything else stays the same. But then, I don't consider language an exclusively antagonist game.

– see Fanny Söderbäk, Impossible Mourning

Performance as Act

The distinction between history and myth is blurred. History, just as truth, depends on myth to come to life. The productive tension between the two underpins the Platonic account too: It is only by resorting to the myth of the cave that Socrates (as rendered down by Plato) is able to bespeak the truth in the first place.

... (As for culture) it is only insofar as we play games and tell stories that reality comes to be, and is allowed to change. Without the awkwardness and inadequacy of language and dialogue (In terms of intention or even representation) life becomes mechanical, perfectly dead. And it is exactly the excessiveness that these failures inhabit that reminds us that we are dealing with art and not philosophy. Socrates claims that he wants to expel the artist from his city because art is too far removed from truth. Behind that claim, however, hides a fear of that which cannot be reined into neat categories, that which always exceeds its own boundaries, that which in fact threatens boundaries as such.

... that every act of appropriation is bound to fail; that the human condition is a perpetual playful becoming that would be extinguished and annihilated if the metaphysical dream of eternal and self-same being was realized.

– Söderbäk

In terms of intention or even representation not every metaphor as a symbol has a meaning that endures, so what's the point of sticking to the truth? But this does not mean it has no history or future anywhere but as a curiosity or trinket on a shelf, worn on the outside (if excavated) not unlike a hood ornament wrapped around your neck, loose-fitting so it doesn't strangle. It is often said that in the old days people wore their subconscious on the outside and buried Mr. Greymatter so their day-time dreaming or play wouldn't be interrupted by all his calculations. When subsumed, so goes the thinking, it's accelerated to quantum speeds like leaps and jumps that we would label intuition, flash, a sixth sense or telepathy. It's maybe all or none of these, how would we know if it's running under cover, subliminally? Sometimes all you can do is go with your gut, and that's not to say "follow orders", it's just a temporary presumption of something you can trust. Distrust is only proved when it's been broken. Like I said before, along with others now and then, we haven't got it wrong, we've just been folded wrong-side out and told that every other way is sin (or something even worse, an embarrassment).

Sometimes archetypes, just like bad habits, appear to be shouting orders, and we notice 'arche-' loses its connection to "olden" like the -ology that digs up bones and arrows from the dirt and instead turns its spade toward the assholes that anarchists are against. You dig? Like, the words we use (a word is a psychological attachment to a boundary around an utterance just to claim some property, not as if it's a child or lover – or for some, maybe it is) once upon a time referred to something very different. In fact (which is just a statement of induction, it's a cover for "I could be wrong, but...") you could say that this concerns most anything. Culture isn't something superimposed on or emergent from nature. It's a pattern recognised and sometimes pathological from everybody's point of view, even when the pattern's still mimicked. Every pattern just endures by telling stories, dramatised and performed like it's a ritual, the motions become automated with increasing practice, forever overdoing rehearsal and forgetting all about the show.

The good news is every script can be re-written, another lesson I'd call "fact" of histories that anyone remembers, and increasingly today comparing news headlines with those last week and how the meaning of a word has changed in just one year when shouted by the same directors, we shouldn't write it off, erased as mere hypocrisy when we can apply to it grafiti, throw tomatoes or read from another script, and prepare to self-defend literarily by plowing on ahead, insisting that beating's only what we do with eggs but on occasion we turn the beaters to a bowl of leaders or directors of our little theatres.

Ignore the chief but if he doesn't go away (he has that option) you may have to resort to thirty seven arrows. Artaud would make the play, a thing considered by some "deception", just to show the option of running just before the arrows fly. If we do it in the theatre, it needn't have to be considered true and reality changes in the telling and the doing – Kristeva's "confinement within the stases", like our arrows now are locked up in museums.

Monsters were created just to stay aware, not necessarily paranoid and running scared. They only came to life when we stopped believing they were there. So even Merlin's law of basic ignorance, which seems so enticing can be broken. If you ignore them they might just conjure up something really frightening (well, so can we!). Unless it's done with some perfection, which is to say electro-shock or surrounding doses of paranoia-inducing substance, theatre for the cruel would quite resemble a poetic curse. It may not be enough, it may need some help with props where all the players' masks are made of mirrors reflecting only the monsters that are the audience. Well that's also been tried before; it doesn't work when monsters cast no reflection.

Of course, Artaud would dispense with the audience altogether (everybody's IT and also in it) as just another set of indeterminacy, a variable, not something to control. In Artaudian theatre, players and spectators are in-distinguished, or such is the intended appearance.

In a word, we believe that there are living forces in what is called poetry and that the image of a crime presented in the requisite theatrical conditions is something infinitely more terrible for the spirit than that same crime when actually committed.

We want to make out of the theater a believable reality which gives the heart and the senses that kind of concrete bite which all true sensation requires. In the same way that our dreams have an effect upon us and reality has an effect upon our dreams, so we believe that the images of thought can be identified with a dream which will be efficacious to the degree that it can be projected with the necessary violence. And the public will believe in the theater's dreams on condition that it take them for true dreams and not for a servile copy of reality; on condition that they allow the public to liberate within itself the magical liberties of dreams which it can only recognize when they are imprinted with terror and cruelty.

Hence this appeal to cruelty and terror, though on a vast scale, whose range probes our entire vitality, confronts us with all our possibilities.

– Antonin Artaud, The Theatre & Cruelty

Pandora was right to open up the box because in it was our resistance that the bosses labeled "every thing that's evil". That's always just a point of view, especially when you're running frightened that you'll lose control. Pandora never meant a sacrificial state, it meant 'all-giving' or 'all gifted' otherwise her name would be "Panthusia" or "Pantheon", like the oligarchs or bureaucrats that keep you in your place. The Greek words for "sacrifice" are either thusia, the noun which means nothing beyond "victimized" or "a victim", and the verb form thuo, meant "to slay, kill or slaughter" – Theo is of course a receptive god in the bible, the only consumer at the table, and we're supposed to be his cooks. Once upon a time the killing was what was done just before a feast because most folks still preferred it cooked if food could run away before you eat it. In the olden days a feast was just a gathering from which no one left still hungry.

Why would wearing telescopic glasses or time-travel be considered just a cover or disguise if it helps to make things clear like "watch out where you're headed"? And why should we trust anything presented so clearly and distinctly, that is to say so logical or banal that it puts us to sleep? Better to just move on to something else if you don't feel the need to exercise or have already had your brain-cells wiggled – it's just a game and you're not required to play in it. But don't forget about the beasts who may have wrote it. If you don't like it, plagiarize with nasty cuts or broken glass and wheat-paste it upon their peepers, they're just announcements of a new show soon to be playing near you! If you don't understand, that "jeepers!" sounds like "gibberish" or "Greek", then think of it as just another entertainment. After all, what else is there when the monsters take a fall and go to pieces?

Stasis, Chaos & Detournement

"First of all, I am not sure what a ‘full-scale refusal of the Symbolic’ would mean, whether it is possible on [Judith] Butler’s own account, and whether it is even desirable. For Kristeva, poetic language is ‘the ultimate means of its (the symbolic order’s) transformation and subversion, the precondition for its survival and revolution’. Subversion, for Kristeva, means transformation, not complete breakdown or erasure. And the aim of poetic language, as I read her, is not merely to destroy the symbolic order, but rather to allow it to survive – a term which I suggest that we must understand quite literally as the sustainability and injection of life and aliveness into discourse, as opposed to a kind of mechanical and dead discourse that would reproduce itself eternally and exclude alterity and alteration altogether.[21] In fact, Kristeva warns us of the potential danger inherent in the transgressive element of artistic creation, and calls for a ‘structurally necessary protection, one that serves to check negativity, confine it within the stases, and prevent it from sweeping away the symbolic position’.

[21] Kristeva asserts that, ‘only the subject, for whom the thetic is not a repression of the semiotic chora but instead a position either taken on or undergone, can call into question the thetic so that a new disposition may be articulated’. What is at stake here is renewal, not absolute destruction. Later in Revolution in Poetic Language she reminds us that while the thetic is ‘absolutely necessary’, it is nevertheless ‘not exclusive: the semiotic […] constantly tears it open, and this transgression brings about all the various transformations of the signifying practice that are called “creation.” […] what remodels the symbolic order is always the influx of the semiotic’.

– Fanny Söderbäk

Despite the presumed impossibility to send something into nothing without a trace or memory, one must at this point wonder what is left in this symbolic order called modernity which anyone would want to save. But few consider the symbol by itself an arch-enemy, it's the ordered system it maintains and most now know by means of some induction that no structure can be indefinitely sustained. That word's itself a triple negative, three times absurd is always more than twice an oxymoron unless one leaves behind Euclid or forms all dialectical or jump off the butcher block beneath cadaver's come-on with his scalpel redirected toward the dripping adam's apple. Like, it's the corpse that's cutting you upon dissecting tables.

A newborn or one inside a period of gestation is no commercial product of either fathers or mothers. It's a self-creating symbiont of creatures once residing in them recursively and then later leaving and when they meet there's always an explosion: they call it "cell biology", without the jargon, "birds and bees" just to avoid that romantic word some once called 'love'. That very word is black magic when it causes moderns to get queasy and then vomit and think sex is property that must be taken. There's little doubt to history that a meeting's just a place and time for having, cutting, eating meat. but speaking prehistorically, that meter was just metaphoric for mothers giving milk, a reduced-to-liquid meat for infancy or hostess pouring mead for company where it's not a job but results from her interest, not necessarily in it but by chance instead? Aesthetics finds a difference between an interest and just more usery. We may just place too much emphasis on agendas, looking out for something really which is in and looking in for everything that's out, as if we couldn't shift or oscillate or even simultaneously experience a hyphenated in-out, in-out state without accusing or complaining or to find that something's always born from our wierd juxtapositions, never the same experience for anyone but commensurate like Alfred Jarry's "equivalence of all absurdities". Discovering them of old was called, by practice, "divination", now all chance encounter is eliminated or forbidden or excused "It was an accident! Who knows where that shit came from? Must have been the booze."

Like the trickster, maternity is no identity or destination except at the time and space when it's adorned, like a face-mask that does not change or cover anything. It's no secret, just a mystery how all those tiny molecules come together making trees and then sustain them. Maternity itself, in terms of semiotics or the building blocks of symbols, is a repressed line of thinking as it often leads us to contemplating chaos, crime and sin, not just in factories constructing parts for your replacement, never punching father's time-clocks, ever in containment. That's why ever since the first commander, we've been told we are the population problem. When there were only nine of us, someone didn't off the thug.

UTERO-SEMIOTICS: concerning signs in an indeterminate context, a random distribution, not in themselves as such (an sich) but without reference other than transitively transitive poetic, briefly pointed or provisional. The paradox for Jung is in this group of undirecting signs live ancient symbols, a foggy graveyard of undying archetypes some call vague memory, undisclosed history, mirrors of an eternity that Freud and others called "unconscious" brimming, less considerate name "oblivion", pessimists: "imagination", optimists: "hope" or source of curiosity and home to possibility, one thing's for sure: it's always misty. What it is for freaks that dreamers would call "beauty", sometimes "horror", this semiotic fluid linguists search semantics or for grammar, is just an academic's synonym for "psychedelic" (I call it "paisley"). It may be the site for resurrecting dead metaphors, it is also arsenal for detournement of the living. According to Julia Kristeva, it's a conservative force like maternal renewal and also box (think of the sweet Pandora) of revolutionary potential – it's subversive. Both rhythmic and metric, it is itself a symbol system repressed by symbolic stuff from grey matter as if (patrimetric) material emissions, it's contained not like a house, a bed or flower pot but like a prison. When it escapes (it always does) in dreams or art (when even as commodity) or other port-hole, windowpane or crack left open, Mr. Greymatter (self-repressed euclidean) assures "they're lies" or justifies the label called "neurotic" and the righteous parental types call "childish", everything unorthodox which priests call "sin". But this is the case only when greymatter thinks it's god inside a body that's a prison or a temple, an orphan never knowing nurture from a mother or ripped off from home for education or by slavers or just way too much time in front of father empire's big screen T.V., a window only looking out on corporate fabrications like all else is just the background of psycho-mystification.

Eating is hard, but not on the eater (unless it's autocannibalic)

CANNIBALISM: 1. quasi-sex – see 'eat me' (don't confuse with SEx, an anagram for self-exchange); 2. unquestioningly consuming knowledge or kneading (rolling it for raising dough); 3. the theory of employment (converting your own kin or strangers into energy and products to increase your mere survival without leakage from your ducts and capillaries); 4. consuming a disposable shell, mold or form such as an Aztec pump organ, dropped placenta or fingernails:

"For the moment, we need to keep in mind three types of things: 1) that which comes to be, 2) that in which it comes to be [receptacle], and 3) that after which the thing coming to be is modeled, and which is the source of its coming to be. It is in fact appropriate to compare the receiving thing to a mother, the source to a father, and the nature between them to their offspring ... a mother or recepticle (is) an invisible and characterless sort of thing".

– Plato

But that's only a pointed metaphor of male matters – try saying it to vinegar, praying manti or black-widowed spiders. Nothing? Even when a way of talking like a corpse, for the child the source is always mom or even grandma! And sans an endorsed contract from the state, who's to say who was your father but the catcher at the plate? Does it really matter? What would change if you were born as someone else? Isn't everyone precisely that already?

Concerning mothers, Loki teaches one can swim both ways and then repeat it! One can see that mothering's what matters, (nothing's immaterial when "matter" is a verb) and that's a trick that anyone can turn, we even call it "nursing", "nurture" when the context isn't milk or gmo's becoming nature (that which preachers used to call "god's factory") to monopolize (emasculate) all future culture – what some call "symbolic order". That's when the young Trickster must transform into Destroyer, like your gods did to their fathers. I can see what your game is, Mr. Plato: the seeds you plant will only sprout as allergies. I'm thinking only gods are cannibalistic – they're unappealing for the eating except by others who are tasteless or whose appetites have turned to shit; I'm thinking of unsweatened (lite), the liposucking sycophantic.

METABOLISM: (roll along beside, nurture (gently push) from behind, also eating mothers or mother-eating) 1. any grinding process toward the hips before excretion, by which food is converted into the energy and products needed to sustain life after separating out those which might just end it; 2. conversion of matter to energy, ie, what appears death of a substance is growth and reproduction of another, but only through inmixing into chaos and then emerging reconsolidated into something new – it's sort of like technology (when that's not free, it excludes all the middles and whatever's down below) but more resembles art when it's opened up for anyone to see, an autopsy of the living.

Generating no-cost heat for neighbors as a by-product only appears excremental. Plants and bugs who scavenge waste say it's absolute, essential. The shock or awed explosion occurs at that moment of transformation, but should not for your observers (unless their orbit's been disrupted):

– Fig Newton

In myth-time it is only thought a transubstantiation, a new solidarity in what was expansive or explosive (from certain observation posts "it all turns to shit" but from that post they cannot see potential). Density, expansity, density, the law of three is the eternal return, but not of an identity since all density is unique and transitory. Entanglement, a teratory, an open fieldbook of more than a trillion stories that are dances – a bent doughnut only looks like a figure eight from the side – nothing is contained and nothing's emptied. The only for-sure vacuum is ascending gravity (see Desire if you're still hungry). Black is only the inversion of a color to accentuate an image (pay no mind to the void behind the curtain, it's just another image for your inconsideration – it's just the unknown author or a fit of blank imagination).

CATABOLISM: (roll/throwing down) the production of energy (capital) through the conversion of complex (living) molecules into simpler (dead) ones, one little bite at a time. – see the difference between parasite and paracide.

Beating babies even mataphorically tenderizes spirits toward and for authority.. Metaphor was once the form of mothers up till gods proclaimed perogative to open and close wombs so they could eat the newborn, a potential every generation for another revolution, its consumption thought to halt a foregone conclusion but even so the fates were only tempted, and Zeus's grand solution was to supper on the mother.

– Euchronius Funk

Birth is as much a rebirth, a return of the mother-as-young-girl or maiden, as the infant who is, for all appearance, new, all the while the placental organ is born dead and rendered into food. The singular event of parturition encompasses or is commensurate with every transition, even puberty, and that is likely near the time (or is it tome?) of baby's first, but in this sense a mother's second birth. The I/you split's ambiguous, especially at first. It was all about a rythm and a meter, now it's just a rhyme producing blues because it's called a "labor" as is anything juxtaposed to pain and then projected onto others. For men who like their answers cut and dried, maternity's a mystery so they proceed to treat them just like any other piece of meat and then proceed to rewrite history, to own and keep what's been digested – developmental growth is ever after confined to matters of economy – the only things that they can bear are prisons. "Bearing" is the clue that something in their head's gone missing.

FREEDOM: 1. A satanic promise of Utopia the priest and his police will never know. 2. the "ownership" of the means of, neither production nor reproduction, but mischief, which is only the ability or energy or potential to turn against the wind, to go more with the nurturing than toxic; to turn for no reason whatsoever in or outside of an experimental context. There is no choice available 'til one comes to a turning point. This is the basic law of navigation. A turning point is just a noticed reinforcement suggestive of another way. The law is never legal cause its only definition – it is really just an insincere appeal, otherwise the lawyer-judges wouldn't have to keep concealing that behind them stands the guns and clubs and knives and bars of steel. Who would need a law to tell them not to leap off, high on spinning ferris wheels nor to eat your grandma 'cause your gut says "feed me please, or I will eat whatever in you I can feel"?

Were it not expected to become broken, there would be no law created. A regularity is a mathematic or statistical assessment or it's an observation. It only speaks to frequencies and their seemly distribution. The only use for this 'normality' is to facilitate prediction. That comes in handy; it can be reasuring. The regulation is no assessment at all. It demands the normal is the only possibility and can only give one a false sense of security. A front to hide a major insecurity: it's precarious. You could say that legislators have no mathematic capability, so how could they cope with any sort of poetry or witness more than simple (tit-for-tatish) resonating patterns?

– M. F. (Mathew Flunky) Junky

When going seems a rut that is spinning you in circles, and in lieu of external encouragement or road signs scattered round and bout, which is to say a plan, playful chance (that's spontaneity) creates its own turning points, opens possibility, the word for mischief is play, whether or not it's an act in three part realities. Hence planning remains the most popular sport for the unwilling types of casualties prone to go with whatever a breeze is blowing or line of shit that's snorting. Unfortunately, since games are the mechanisation of play ("there are rules!" they say), the limits of planning resemble the limits of mechanics, and for social change, increased mechanisation is fast falling out of favour. It turns out that mechanised society is precisely the problem folks bitch about, it brings to mind Jo Stalin as well as George Orwell's 1984, and for many, even those, by today's standards, are looking less hostile.

DIABOLISM: Friction. Every internal or external contradiction produces friction, which is heat, which continues struggle (if only to let off steam or some other excretion). Continued struggle after letting loose produces a victor (think 'quicksand'). It is therefore always encouraged by enforcers of control (the game is their salary, seat and earthly cup for tits or tea afterwards – it's tit for tat, the common game of all economy and that's for home security and 'winning', otherwise known as a boring penetration just before yer own capitulation – one gets swollowed or is flushed when the preferred residence is a toilet).

"Unless we change direction, we are likely to end up just where we're headed"

– Pinyin Wan, New Wives' Tailings from Olden Chinese Sayings, 3rd cent b.c.

Capitalist civilisation is the absolute extent of the nature of dialectics. That is the only absolutely agreed-upon absolute. Unfortunately for the civilised, every child understands that nature is itself not dialectical (it's just a con who's hiding behind curtains, like Pelonius, unknowing it's for him – they think they're wizards or that they're immortal beings), at least, not till youngsters learn the word, "opposite" and are taught its universal application. This lesson ends childhood, unless they become it and keep a certain fondness for disorder.

Mischief, ever an invention by the young of every species, breaks one free of all friction cycles set on crumble, excuse me, tumble. Even those that spiral, some would call it syncopated swimming if they're sympathetic drummers. Other than your murder or lobotomy, the only reaction the civil order can engage is to increase its own acceleration, like rapid spin before the drying, and that is always in a cannibalic metabolication – of sorts, a new vacation, and for which there's not a chance of vaccination. To mix your metaphors when contemplating soaking tubs of gin-and-tonic clubs is no sign of madness. Never fear, it's just anger and poetic way to blow their brains out like a curse that looks just like a master blaster. That's the secret to embracing or escaping into chaos like you're hiding underneath someone else's mother's skirts to find some breathing room and catch it, like in Old Norway Hela was a hela pretty goddess and not the joint good christians fear to smoke in.