Anarchism is not Enough: An Anonymous Book

The most curiously integrated of the groups of stories which may be classified as a single dramatic (or philosophical) unit of the book is the queen-group. Indeed it is possible to discuss this group as if it were but one story, the episodic variations seeming no more than caprices of style—the same story told in different degrees of earnestness and so in different personalities, as it were. The one fixed personality of the group is the Queen herself; the others are all stylistic personalities. The Queen began as a photograph used by a newspaper at discreet intervals to represent the female bandit of the moment or the murder-victim or the fire-heroine or the missionary’s bride. By experience and variety she became a personality, and a fixed personality. It is quite remarkable in fact how under our very eyes this anonymous author should be able to transform a fiction into a fact: for the Queen is as true for always as the photograph is each time false. Indeed, the whole transformation is merely a matter of style. To illustrate: “As Maxine, the world’s sleeplessness champion, the photograph had great momentary importance but did not know it because it was part of a newspaper dynamic in which everything happened with equal fatalistic effect, everything was accident, in the moment succeeding accident it was always clear that nothing had happened. As photograph therefore the photograph saw all this; it was permanently unimportant but it knew this. And as it had a knowledge of its unimportance, it also had a knowledge of the importance of accident; and as the first knowledge made it insignificant so the second knowledge made it Queen. The Queen, the photograph without identity, this anonymous particularity, did in fact dwell in a world in which she was the only one and in which the world of many was only what she called ‘the chaotic conversation of events.’ So she resolved to put her queendom in order, not by interrupting the conversation, which would only have increased the chaos, but by having minutely recorded whatever ‘happened,’ whatever ‘was.’ Nothing then in her queendom contradicted anything else, neither the argument nor its answer, neither the burglar-proof lock nor the burglar against whom it was not proof: everything was so, everything was statistical, everything was falsification, everything was conversation, and she was an anonymous particularity conversing with herself about her own nothingness, so she was outside the chaotic conversation of events, she was Queen.”

Her three chief statisticians (we learn) were publishers. They were all pleasant fellows, each with a touch of the universal in him, and came and went without suspicion everywhere in the queendom because of their peoplishness: they too, like all the rest, were statistical, so statistical indeed that they were statisticians. They went about preaching the gospel of the communal ownership of events. They said: “Primitive man believed in things as events. As civilized man it is your duty to believe in events as things.” And the people did. And they permitted the statisticians (or publishers) to know what happened to them and what they did with what happened to them as faithfully as they reported their possessions each year in the great Common Book. In this queendom there was no loss and no mystery and no suffering, because everything was reported as conversation and nothing therefore thought about. All was automatic spontaneity, even their love for their Queen. As for the Queen, she would walk (we are told) through the dark rooms of her palace at night, having each room lit only upon her leaving it, until she reached her own small chamber, which remained unlit all night while the others shone; until morning, when in her own small chamber the curtains were drawn, the lamps lit, while in all the other rooms of the palace there was daylight. The meaning of this is plain: that in the anonymousness of the Queen lay her non-statistical, her non-falsificatory individuality. She is the author, the Queendom is her book. She is darkness and mystery, the plain, banal though chaotic daylight is her unravelling. By making the unravelling more methodic and so more plainly banal she separates in people the statistical from the non-statistical part, the known from the anonymous. She shows herself to be a dualist of the most dangerous kind.

For a long time the authorities from the internal evidence of the queen-stories suspected the anonymous author of being a woman. They said that it was not improbable that the book was the Bible of an underground sect devoted to educating female children to be statistical queens. But this view had to be abandoned as unscholarly, even ungentlemanly, because in nothing that the Queen said or did was there any accent of disorder or ambition: she merely, with miraculous patience and tact, saw to it that records were kept of everything. The authorities eventually concluded that she was a Character of Fiction, and so stainless, and could not help them. For some time their suspicion was fixed on a character in one of the stories with whom the Queen fell in love. But as he was Minister of Pastimes to the Queen it was thought that it might prove generally disrespectful to State officials to pursue the matter further (as when, in the story Understanding, suspicion was fixed on the character who bribed the magistrates to convict him, the inquiry was stopped by the authorities—the detectives even put on the wrong scent—as too metaphysical and cynical).

It must now be clear that the strain of my task is beginning to tell on me. I have become very nervous. In the beginning my emotions were all scholarly, my task was a pleasure, I had the manner of calmness with an antiquity. Towards the end fear has crept upon me. I must speak, and after that go on till I can go on no longer: till I am prevented. I say prevented. For I am haunted by the obsession that the authorities are still watching. They do not suspect the Queen. She was or is a fixed personality, so anonymous as to be irreproachably a Character of Fiction. The others vary in earnestness; in anonymity; they are, as I have suggested, personalities of style; they point to the probability that the author was not or is not a Character of Fiction. I dare go no further. I have become very nervous. I shall nevertheless attempt to continue my task until—I am prevented.

One of the three publishers was a Jew. He was tall, his ears oustanding, his grin long, his voice loose in his mouth. He had been financial adviser to a charitable organization and had had much general statistical though humane experience. He was gross but kind and therefore in charge of all sentimental records: his grossness assured accuracy, his kindness, delicacy.

He had the historical genius, and several specimens of his work are given—though with a touch of dryness in the author himself which makes it impossible to enjoy them as we might have were the book without an author. Indeed, they were not meant to be read at all, but merely written to satisfy the political instincts of the Queen, who never read them herself. I find it difficult to pass over them myself, for aside from their part in the book they are very interesting. There are several small extracts that might be used here with complete propriety and even in a scholarly way. And after all, the author wrote them down himself, did he not? But he was writing and not reading. But am I not writing and not reading? My position becomes more and more uncertain. I shall hurry on.

I shall give one of the Queen’s monologues, to tide us over this difficult period. The monologue does not appear in the book itself: it would have been a piece of naturalism contrary to the theory on which the book was built. Therefore I give it here, as reading. No questions must be asked of me, for as a scholar I should feel obliged to answer them; and the passage would then become writing; and I should have produced a piece of naturalism. Here then is, shall I say, a variety: which is not the anonymous author’s writing but we might almost say his reading, and after that my writing but of his reading, which remains reading for all my writing. My conscience is in your hands: the burden of curiosity and falsification falls upon you. With you rest also the rights of anonymity, the reputation of style, the fortunes of publication, the future of philosophy and scholarship and the little children, for whom these contrive sense. Sense, I say, not satire.

And now for the Queen’s monologue, which the anonymous author did not write and which for this very reason requires, as the reader’s part, sense, I say, not satire, even more immediately than what he did write. Furthermore, you will have to discover for yourself where it begins and where it ends: were I to mark it off it would become writing and so a piece of naturalism and so belie sense and give encouragement to satire. I mean: restraint, statistics, falsification, are more accurate than courage, reality, truth, and so truer. For the Queen’s monologue, since the anonymous author did not write it down, is true; had he not statistically, falsificatorily, restrained himself from writing it down it would have become a piece of naturalism and so a subject of satire. To tide us over a difficult period I set myself the difficult task of writing down the Queen’s monologue without turning it into writing, and so defying satire (if I succeed, which depends on you). The important thing is to defy satire. Satire is lying: falsity as opposed to truth and falsity as opposed to falsification. It is betwixt and between; against sense, which, whatever it is, is one thing or the other-—generally the other, it being for practical purposes impossible for it to be perpetually one thing. By practical purposes I mean of course the question of boredom, as truth finding truth is monotonous. Therefore things happen. Sense, I say, not satire. Imagine a woman has her heart broken and imagine a man breaking it, then her heart heals and he ceases to be a villain, and then they meet again and her heart is whole and he is not a villain. Does she weep because her heart was once broken and does he blush because he once broke it? This would be satire. No, they both smile, and she gives him her heart to break again, and he breaks it. This is sense. Or they both smile and turn away from each other, and this, too, is sense, but sense too academic to survive the strain of academically enforcing itself. The One Thing must be saved from itself, it must not be allowed to overwork itself or to go stale. That is why sense is one thing or the other and generally the other: falsification to relieve truth, broken hearts to protect whole hearts, weakness to spare strength. Fact is fancy and fancy is desire and desire is puff! puff! everything that satisfies it and which must be carefully recorded in spite of contradictions and lengthiness. Desire is the other things, in great number. And what is satisfaction? Not the other things, which satisfy, but the one thing, that cannot satisfy or be satisfied, and so, though but one thing, equal to desire, and so to all the other things. Fact is it not me; fact is fancy and fancy is desire and desire is the other things. Satisfaction is me, which it calls Queen. It is a lot of him’s, it is a queendom, it is desire speaking the language of satisfaction, it is a great looseness and restlessness of fact and confusion of eyesight and costume, into which the Queen brings sense through order. And what is order? Order is observation. Her first publisher (or statistician) is a gross, kind Jew. Her second is a subtle, cruel Turk, who brutally forced events: he has the political genius. But the people do not mind, since the events happen anyhow: they shrug their shoulders good-naturedly and say “Old Hassan Bey smiling with Turkish teeth,” and call on the first publisher to take notice how smilingly they wince back. Her third is a Christian, and he does nothing: he has the philosophical genius. His idleness and talkativeness exasperate the other two into efficiency. His favourite harangue is: “Let the people create their own order.”

“But how, their own order?”

“Let them think.”

“But if they think, they will all think differently, and not only differently—some will think more powerfully than others.”

“Exactly: those who think more powerfully than others will create order.”

“But this would not be real order, rather the disorder of a false order created by the most powerfully thinking individual or individuals of the moment. This would be anarchism, and anarchism is not enough!”

“I have heard that said before, but how is the order created by the Queen not anarchism?”

“The Queen does not create order, she observes methodically, she creates her order. That is why it is her queendom.”

“But is this not merely a refined form of anarchism?”

“No, it is more than anarchism. The Queen is not the chief individual of her queendom; she is the me of the it; she is the one thing, her queendom is the other things; she is satisfaction, her queendom is desire, a lot of him’s. The more me she is, the more it it is, and the more anonymous she is, and the more she and her queendom are diplomatically indistinguishable. The domestic situation is of course another affair. But to carry the distinction beyond the boundaries of the book is to fall betwixt and between, into satire.”

– by Laura Riding, 1928

The Thing about Sunlight:

In Dante's inferno or Blake's deranged pit,
in a cosmical egg or à plomb chaotique,
whether one world or many doesn't mean shit.

Should you fall to the bottom, your ass gets a kick,
not slightly transformed, (did you think I meant lick?).
Not sure of your hist'ry, thrown back through the mirror,

if you trust it's a myst'ry, you needn't keep score.
If this wasn't as true as you lick off your thumb,
then where do you s'pose all that sunlight came from?

– Pyrrho's Technique

By its own definition, "thing" is either and both an unnamed and indeterminate autonomosity, so therefore, is only presumed to be materially existent, unless as a stand-in or proxy for some relation or process, in which case matter is immaterial and existence incorporeal. In any language it translates to "garble". And applying to anything, once named or observed, it loses its thingness, and hence, its material objectivity – now it's glaringly subjective – for

1. consideration on the one hand, or
2. 'exploitation' on an other, and
3. ignorance by any other criterion than luminosity (like stars in your eyes) or feeling (like a headache)

an affinity perchance or adventure which may lose its thing for animosity or paranoia: by association in the first which makes it relative to something else so is no longer independent; destruction in the second by virtue of its consumption or corruption (something we can't be directly assured of when even repressed skeletons emerge from dark closets); and outright disappears in the third like a closing wound or zipper – in any case it may just be a phantom, so we can with confidence proclaim "no thing exists" in dream or awake but for that we have just named or witnessed.

By any reasonable extension, nothing is unknown and all that's left is reality, a world where there's naught left to know. When all questions are obsolete the thing as such and any other self is dogma or what's read in any dictionary once one erasses all contra-dictions. Ignoring any sophistry annihilates all poetry, the chief`linguistic substance which so upset Plato, the nature of language games of which entendres or polysemy, anomolies are the`necessary conditions for any comparison, definition and assessment concerning any context, predictive predilection, and without any of which witness wanton predicates or you're placed under predation, sometimes called "into perdition".

Without some kindred for comparison, to name an unwitnessed thing eliminates all chance for consideration, use or antipathy, a thing which only authorities can offer (it's often all they have) so is taken as such, like a ding an sich as if one missed the garage door entirely, and with no ambivalence, call for property damage or a speedy ambulance. Dogma's truth is given, no questions asked, but it's no gift when every thing else is taken, most of which is room for curiosity and exploration. Doubt and fallibility or each judgment fast suspended returns the gift as an offering or suggestion and nothing gets expended. In lieu of inquests for an answer or tit-for-tat exchange, nothing can be shared except erotic poems and carnage, in either case transformed, it means it'll never be the same and even when if noticed, nothing will be missed, except perhaps the sunshine or more light on the subject though not directly in your eye.

Skepticism, ranging from a simple suspension of judgement to the outright denial of truth (although Pyrrho suggested "we neither deny nor affirm anything"), need not lead to passivity (that is literally impassive or "impressively impassable") and indifference nor to morality and the formulation of an ethics (as has been traditionally demanded by seekers of the right and true – but not the beautiful), nor to an impossible impasse, (just to double emphasize the point) although there may be no shortage of dilemma for decision-makers, meddlers and other fast-talkers equiped with intellectual ammunition in thirty round clips. A proper dialectic is just a pair of shoelaces or a set of reins: right and left make no difference to keeping your boots on while holding your horses.

ANTISYNTHESIS:

"The mode, power, might or technique of the Sceptical School is to place the phenomenal in opposition to the intellectual "in any way whatever," and thus through the equilibrium of the reasons and things opposed to each other, to reach, first the state of suspension of judgment, and afterwards that of imperturbability. We do not use the word power in any unusual sense, but simply, meaning the force of the system. By the phenomenal, we understand the sensible, hence we place the intellectual in opposition to it. The phrase "in any way whatever," may refer to the word power in order that we may understand that word in a simple sense as we said, or it may refer to the placing the phenomenal and intellectual in opposition. For we place these in opposition to each other in a variety of ways, the phenomenal to the phenomenal, and the intellectual to the intellectual, or reciprocally, and we say "in any way whatever," in order that all methods of opposition may be included. Or "in any way whatever" may refer to the phenomenal and the intellectual, so that we need not ask how does the phenomenal appear, or how are the thoughts conceived, but that we may understand these things in a simple sense. By "reasons opposed to each other," we do not by any means understand that they deny or affirm anything, but simply that they offset each other. By equilibrium, we mean equality in regard to trustworthiness and untrustworthiness, so that of the reasons that are placed in opposition to each other, one should not excel another in trustworthiness.

... The fundamental principle of the Sceptical system is especially this, namely, to oppose every argument by one of equal weight, for it seems to us that in this way we finally reach the position where we have no dogmas."

– Sextus Empiricus

AGRIPPA'S OR MÜNCHHAUSEN TRILEMMA

1. All justifications in pursuit of certain knowledge have also to justify the means of their justification and doing so they have to justify anew the means of their justification. Therefore there can be no end. We are faced with the hopeless situation of an infinite regression.
2. One can stop at self-evidence or common sense or fundamental principles or speaking 'ex cathedra' or at any other evidence, but in doing so the intention to install certain justification is abandoned.
3. The third horn of the trilemma is the application of a circular argument.

The agreement of slaves or antagonists, consensus leads more to dogma if not politically, democratic submission, a sacrifice or compromise. Like the Zapitistas the German assembly was a thing, but only birthed after being held up against the wall by Latin broadswords or their equivalent. Before confederation for defense from French and English conquistadors, the Iroquoian council called up nothing and stood nowhere. They were called up to help with someone facing some impending uncertainty (or so the story goes).

Before any administrative council, the thing was a festival or what happens within a circle of interest. A meet, moot or meat, the sense of which is the same, a stretch or an affair, the place for a fair. Prior to the middle ages, which is to say, in myth-time and truth was just what's trusting, the thing of aesthetic mutuality 'twas neither an economic fare nor politically fair, that certain place where justice must always proceed both from and with some jousting and never just in jest. In lieu of divinity, recipe or chance supposition, a thing is just another choice or means for a movement when confronting uncertainty. As they used to say, "bad company often makes strange bed-fellows" just prior to prescribing a strong laxative.

"We say that the Sceptic does not dogmatise. We do not say this, meaning by the word dogma the popular assent to certain things rather than others (for the Sceptic does assent to feelings that are a necessary result of sensation, as for example, when he is warm or cold, he cannot say that he thinks he is not warm or cold), but we say this, meaning by dogma the acceptance of any opinion in regard to the unknown things investigated by science. For the Pyrrhonean assents to nothing that is unknown. Furthermore, he does not dogmatise even when he utters the Sceptical formulae in regard to things that are unknown, such as "Nothing more," or "I decide nothing," or any of the others about which we shall speak later. For the one who dogmatises regards the thing about which he is said to dogmatise, as existing in itself; the Sceptic does not however regard these formulae as having an absolute existence, for he assumes that the saying "All is false," includes itself with other things as false, and likewise the saying "Nothing is true"; in the same way "Nothing more," states that together with other things it itself is nothing more, and cancels itself therefore, as well as other things. We say the same also in regard to the other Sceptical expressions. In short, if he who dogmatises, assumes as existing in itself that about which he dogmatises, the Sceptic, on the contrary, expresses his sayings in such a way that they are understood to be themselves included, and it cannot be said that he dogmatises in saying these things. The principal thing in uttering these formulae is that he says what appears to him, and communicates his own feelings in an unprejudiced way, without asserting anything in regard to external objects...

It is evident that we pay careful attention to phenomena from what we say about the criterion of the Sceptical School. The word criterion is used in two ways. First, it is understood as a proof of existence or non-existence, in regard to which we shall speak in the opposing argument. Secondly, when it refers to action, meaning the criterion to which we give heed in life, in doing some things and refraining from doing others, and it is about this that we shall now speak. We say, consequently, that the criterion of the Sceptical School is the phenomenon, and in calling it so, we mean the idea of it. It cannot be doubted, as it is based upon susceptibility and involuntary feeling. Hence no one doubts, perhaps, that an object appears so and so, but one questions if it is as it appears. Therefore, as we cannot be entirely inactive as regards the observances of daily life, we live by giving heed to phenomena, and in an unprejudiced way. But this observance of what pertains to the daily life, appears to be of four different kinds. Sometimes it is directed by the guidance of nature, sometimes by the necessity of the feelings, sometimes by the tradition of laws and of customs, and sometimes by the teaching of the arts. It is directed by the guidance of nature, for by nature we are capable of sensation and thought; by the necessity of the feelings, for hunger leads us to food, and thirst to drink; by the traditions of laws and customs, for according to them we consider piety a good in daily life, and impiety an evil; by the teaching of the arts, for we are not inactive in the arts we undertake. We say all these things, however, without expressing a decided opinion." (ibid)

But a virtue itself, particularly one of submission (piety) or aloofness (disinterest), is incompatible with every-day life taken together with any other pro- or im-posed value: there is an impiousness lurking 'neath the lines of every skeptic wishing a voice without being cast into the pit undone or too early. Virtue is only true of and in itself or when in the isolation of solitary confinement, which is to say out of space or context, emulated or enframed, in-flamed and therefore false or dying, but without the insinuation of lying and that is sometimes called hypocrisy or else delusion. It may just be outside of myth-time, everything's absurd or cast with self-allusion – a thing witnessed shining on every regime may be as certain as any sunburn on a cloudless day or gamma rays when shady so to wish to further cloud things up would be by all a thing of virtuous desire often, traveling underneath the name of mayhem.

"One cannot but recall here a witty formula of life under a hard Communist regime: Of the three features—personal honesty, sincere support of the regime and intelligence—it was possible to combine only two, never all three. If one was honest and supportive, one was not very bright; if one was bright and supportive, one was not honest; if one was honest and bright, one was not supportive."

– Žižek

What is thought to be a dilemma concerning reality is no such thing should you follow Einstein's advice and enlarge your circle of interest or compassion to let things fall where they may but not refrain from taking action or speaking things relatedly. Such as was in myth-time is now mislabeled ancestor worship, the same folks who say "If it was good enough for grandpa then it's good enough for me.

To wit: Consider a child is in the street and comes along a bus. Either may be your own but the juxtaposition presents three alternatives.

1. The first, if you're a human and you don't drop dead in shock, is your heart clogs up your throat and your gut falls down an elevator shaft and you're there (the "mother panic maneuver"), and just in time at that.
2. On the other hand your grasp comes up empty – the child was just an optical illusion – and pausing in momentary dismay, the bus grinds your new haircut out from the pothole and into the asphalt.
3. The weighty analysis. Should you have prior stopped to consider more carefully the options and the situation and then proceed with more certainty or do nothing, walk without a care and guarantee your safety or prevent the accusation you've been once again in error?

The smart thing would be to have abstained from all demands that say that you should cut your hair and hope for the best because if it's not one thing, it'll always be t'other. Burying your feelings on any matter never meant, except by chance, you'll come out any other end unscathed or less demented like reversing the transmission back across the railroad tracks to re-align your front suspension. But just in case, so said Pascal, all lacking in a certainty, you give it a shot, and that's experimentalism, believe it or not. On clear days even juries cast the shadows of a doubt.

Titanomachy Comes Around to Reconstructing Carpetbags

Teleology's an anticipation of a pay-off. A free expression doesn't need ulterior motive, sometimes just a great big perturbation. There's nothing more abusive than a truth that's not elusive. Should you catch it take a rest and liquid else yer cursed so go to hell or somewhere even more insipid.

It's said the gods themselves were one-time titans, and then they got religion when mighty titan force was no longer sufficient to sustain the realty of kingly or more philistine estates from invasions or assassinations; when habit proved too fickle as the new invaders were oft' the miss-content of what was formerly an outward trickle, "good form or good riddance!" no longer suitable, the Truth was invented: what cropped up now and then was henceforth to be a universal. Of necessity were there priest-kings, then on Egypt's fine example, realigned into religion and after many corpses came the all infallible, The Reason, good for use in any season.

Good reasons always need a partner, so our Hegel once had said. Synthesis is fabrication, a structure placed upon the dead. Before offing old Goliath, young Prince Dave was prob'ly no more an itinerant goat-herder than the giant, Honest Abe had been a logger (he was a lawyer), but since the Yellow Emperor, history's written as an epitaph a'top some speechless heads, but only by the conqueror after vanquishing the Rebs.

As a means to classify (with the singular criterion) now by nature folks divided along lines of status, race and gender, impiety and treason or for any handy reason. Such was Greek democracy (and someone, always trickling upward, both works and pays and to this day, to prey and pray sound just the same – it's sequestration mixed up with well-timed negotiations). With new smarts and realizing the error of their old ways, it hadn't after all been war which needs defeated, but peace in any season – what stays inside is justified, without is bad, none could deny – enclosure laws and prison walls are for our own good, and that's always been the greater, inner peace now means "security", or what's in or done for, favour. Whatever's in the basket, it's the same – protection racket. There's always risk. Sometimes it is a bomb, sometimes you miss.

Railroad trains and freeways only interfaced equivalent absurdities, the illusion you can freely move to new and different prisons, I mean cities. Once the righteous good, now it's the baddies hiding 'neath a hood or up against a wall with red and blues a'flashing, crashing through them. It's all the same, and every time it comes around it's different. It was war that birthed the structures, made them all rigid and regal, kept them straight and narrow, lines a'crossing space as if a symbol forever thing eternal (but that's internal "aye's" as in "Because I said so"), and not to lose the point, the arrowhead's a reminder of our history and grammarists use it to control the meaning which is "generate": for every child the question's "Why?" – before a corpse of course it looks like this ––> and then the X, the spot of all degeneration.

As rows and columns preceded all accountants, suits and pigs, so now they've come around again back to the tried and true, the lethal, proving only that a straight line can come back on itself like a spiral made of squares. But it's all illusion: the space had bent at right angles so no one really lost their place (a swerve depends on curves), and pretty soon we all can live in the big outdoors of outer space, that is, when we can alter it, conform to our position which has always been the goal in any race for new material. There's no going back, all else has been forgotten – high or low, for all it was for bidding, like once upon a time they only meant "for having" and "for asking". The most important word 'twas lost was "smithereens": what happens to all multifarious union is corruption, that certain dissolution of controllers of the mean or what's in fashion.

Today's Mythic narrative was called The Idiocracy, and everyone believes it might just be the last to be. Controllers have departed 'cross the cryptic overseas (it may be near Miami) and Dunderheads, that race of con-patrols and the richest you will see, the one-time petty burgeoisie've been left no reins for which to hold or lead, they've gone quite raving and unstable, and all that will remain may soon be called The Uncontrollables. But there's still hope for rectal types to get up, wipe their ass, regain their youth, to dig out with a hook or ladder, perseverate along the lines of truth, which now we know is just construction work and for some others, letting loose your bladder.

Or not. It's probable at some point anything can rot except the truth, for that's impossible as there's no more points beyond this dot.

– Carreck Hoursabhorus

THE VOGOS, of TAU or DEATH

Myth-time is the shaky ground lurking under every truth or calculation. No realm, nor a union, nor reality, a timeless landscape stripped of corpuscles of distance and sequentiality, but occasionally brimming with history. And it comes in all shades of paisley 'cause it's birthed free of a boundary (or at least one it easily sheds like placentas or hard-boiled eggs). The Stewart Principle which proclaims "Every picture tells a story, don't it" (and like a coin or Etruscan mirror, always has another side) is modified by Bergson's durative simultaneity or Butler's reversability of the chicken-egg argument such that every "story is a picture, ain't it" and the quantification which came first is irrelevant to the polyvagus swimming with Mr. Graymatter, who had more in mind the spokesman, Polybius who forgot that betwixt and between every floater and sinker is no more ambiguous than all things amphibious – it's just indeterminate and risky.

– Rodney King

Might I go so far as to suggest that, though they are equivalent in sense, there is received a difference altogether when we hear that "myth-time is non-euclidean space" and its inversion, "when we hear the phrase, non-euclidean space-time, what is meant is myth-time" and that sort of myth is not the fiction that's the classical physics of Richard M. Nixon. As the old Tibetan saying goes, "A" is not "A", therefore we name it "A".

With such logic, and if what we call space were a multidimensionally woven fabric (so to speak), even a paisley tapestry in dark undulation like waves flowing beneath a stationary boat, such that the directional movement of either is an illusion, the measurement of motion a misunderstanding of the intensity of the wave inducing a bounce on all the water that touches it or inversely, is mimicked by them

– in rough seas there's no telling an original pebble perturbing the water just to make waves or rings of concentricity – there is no pebble so its search is what's known as contingent futility – unless there's a port-hole or index to elsewhere (all that which representation excludes) . . .and whose own undulation flows to the shore yet the water has not moved except in relation to the land beneath it as the tides from the moon, like a long, distant lover, which distracted and thereby displaced it, or if in a tub it goes down the drain whilst the floating scum doesn't, and if to this we suggested the no-thingness which is not paisley fabric is the ultimate, par excellent brightness, the infinite everything from which was spun the fibres that weaved the tapestry, "moving" its spirals in every direction whilst going nowhere, (the bisected yinyang is only a leaf on a mango tree), then the most obvious excuse for the stars would be holes in the fabric letting the light through.

We're talking about the inversion of perspective which makes the standard line or come-on, previously important, presently impotent. We're also talking Lewis Carroll's looking glass world with which the same "reason" can apply to both, even the same measuring implements for the spatially insecure, but no direct translation is possible. Each seems fit as a straight jacket for the other. The formula, "A is not A so we call it A" portrays a metaphoric relation, so there is no room for tit-for-tat representation (neither in 'art' nor 'marriage'); at most, conjugation's an orbit, not a property exchange where speed has no bearing on an incurred debt, unless there's a recurring pebble coming your way set on eating out your liver.

[Where I come from, the coin in the mouth or two on the eyes of any corpse but the ones you despise is no payment to an imaginary gondola operator, but has engraved a picture from popular stories depicting a portal or literally porthole out of this world and back in through another. Without such a navigational guide known to work for the living – better even than a lucky charm – it is thought the ferry'd get lost and then foundered. There's also the added advantage in the coin's weight and opacity which prevent distraction by rambling tongues and wandering eyes: It's both a blinder and pacifyer. It's the same logic which enables one sea-monster, swimming through interconnected underground streamlets to appear in any lake or wide spot in the river East of the Cascade Mountains known for bringing bad weather and make a local appearance at a moments notice, and likewise, the local ones do the same in inverted fashion.]

In mythic discourse, there is no economic transaction nor a need for justification to discredit the other, so the question of a reality or truth lying beneath the metaphor or symbolism just doesn't need to come up, and if it did, it'd be like trying to squeeze your ass through one of those tiny holes in the sky to put more light on the subject. That could only result in death, a cosmic boil or a great constipation. Either way, should it fester, one might expect a big bang. Instead of the Logos some gray matter orbits, the paisley is vague but sensed through the vagus and its unfashionable polysemous name is The Vogos, where head-on collisions result not in death but some transformation or for the more dense or gnostic, knocking your lights out is like plugging a hole:

< vogue (n): 1570s, the vogue, "leading place in popularity, greatest success or acceptance," from Middle French vogue "fashion, success, drift, swaying motion (of a boat)" literally "a rowing," from Old French voguer "to row, sway, set sail," probably from Old Low German *wogon, variant of wagon "float, fluctuate," literally "to balance oneself" (see weigh). Apparently the notion is of being "borne along on the waves of fashion." Italian vogare also probably is borrowed from Germanic. Phrase in vogue "having a prominent place in popular fashion" first recorded 1643.

and from which we get Witch, (like Roma's to roam and rough is to rogues, a wand'ring relation before time was in fashion and Keruac's boat was a station wagon):

weigh (v.): Old English wegan "find the weight of, have weight, lift, carry," from Proto-Germanic *weganan (cf. Old Saxon wegan, Old Frisian wega, Dutch wegen "to weigh," Old Norse vega, Old High German wegan "to move, carry, weigh," German wiegen "to weigh"), from PIE *wegh- "to move" (cf. Sanskrit vahati "carries, conveys," vahitram "vessel, ship;" Avestan vazaiti "he leads, draws;" Greek okhos "carriage;" Latin vehere "to carry, convey;" Old Church Slavonic vesti "to carry, convey;" Lithuanian vezu "to carry, convey;" Old Irish fecht "campaign, journey"). The original sense was of motion, which led to that of lifting, then to that of "measure the weight of." The older sense of "lift, carry" survives in the nautical phrase weigh anchor. Figurative sense of "to consider, ponder" (in reference to words, etc.) is recorded from mid-14c.

– etymonline.com

– The full treatment

Understanding may be over(alter)ated:

Capitalism, if it is truly the condition of our existence, cannot be known. We may hope at best, if we are successful in hoping, that it may become wholly unknown...That is not to say that knowledge ought not take a scientific or objective turn, only that this serves no transformational purpose.

– Going to seed

Class consciousness is not the possessed truth of objects (or classes of them) by subjects (or vice versa). It's not even merely a perspective or variable of approach (ie., a 'theory'), but an extended perceptual horizon illustrating that wealthy leaders' very existence hangs upon the exclusion, misery, exploitation or extraction, in other words, the subjection of others. It's a matter of environmental awareness, even compassion should one be carried by experience or by the tales of those who are themselves so carried.

Subjectivity and objectivity are universally meaningless or they are interchangeable. For any detection, the object in hand is said to be data (circuitously defined as 'that which is subject to handling or sensory engagement and manipulation'). Like a bird, it may be the subject of inquiry or merely an obstacle to be tossed aside, in which case, the "real" data remains unknown or, like an undrilled oil well, is yet to be groped – it may be nothing. The object which is subjected to handling is the subject, whether the experiment or investigation is of things or set upon processes. Very often, like in psychological experimentation, a subject means "a live one", but then where does one place school subjects like history, math or grammar except as more real than students? It's all a matter of where you place your exponent.

Value as such, smooth or rough is the subjective experience of the handler of objects, and whose objective is manipulation (literally, 'fingering figures') or an intermediate stage in quite another purpose. This mediation is what we mean by exploitation – the ownership of the means:

"He who controls meaning controls the world"

– Old Man's Tale

Where there is damage to the subject, object or process by the processing of data, the subjective experience is misery from one perspective and pragmatics from the other. It is the basis of (or it lurks under) capitalism, and is justified as "natural" when compared to eating and "neutral" when compared to art. On the other hand, it clearly rhymes with cannibalism, a rarity in nature and typically frowned upon as it is the last stage of any class or species prior to extinction. The rhyme may be chance but the equivalence it portends is not lost on either "side": From the perspective of the leader-eaters (gods), the eaten has always been classed as overwhelmingly other – meat, receptacle or "natural resource". On the brunt of such semantic transformation, one is said to be "objectified", made the equivalent of an inanimate object.

"The Regnorak in Nordic myth-time is the last battle of each against all. Not a single god survived, but some folks did who'd left for the hills or rowed a boat back into mother, eons before or timely, when the shitaree had turned to fire."

– Old Woman's Tale

When there is death or destruction to the subject, object or process by the mining or processing of data, the subjective experience of onlookers from any one perspective (even when pragmatic or utilitarian from another) is war or rape so it, pragmatism, is clearly no universal justification for anything. In the same way, transgression is merely a cross-wise movement on the one hand but no mere "struggle" in the context of war. And like christianity, capitalism cannot thrive unless all of nature other than the immediate subject (the Cartesian ego) is considered a collection of obstacles or otherwise hostile. This is the basis of both Hobbesian and Cartesian (or narcissistic) philosophies and their infinitely recursive cogitations.

The ratios, misery to struggle and war to death, are equivalent. Such is mathematic or objective value in contradistinction to subjective experience. Money is merely it's medium of exchange creating the value-form or commodity. All such exchange cancels experiential value like an electrical shunt to ground, where justice becomes a euphemism for the inability to tell shit from shinola, leaving one always in need of expert opinion. When ensconced in the midst of hostility, value must always come from elsewhere.

One of the illustrations as well as problems with understanding is its method-as-destination, 'going to ground'. This is both the discovery and formation of the subject (thinking, therefore amming), and as integrity demands a line, position or a stand, one is now subject to all the vagaries of nature, be they kind or cruel. The subject position must therefore always come from the ground of slavery or other such stasis. Neither form of immobility has been uncovered by archaeologists digging for first principles. Going to ground with high expectations, one goes nowhere but under or atop a dungheap or other similarly constructed midden. It is home only to the excluded middle and lost art.

To de-fence requires wire-cutters; o'r-fence is a leap or a climb. Either destruction or transcendence demonstrates a will to distributivity, not the content stasis of being, even for more seedy types. Life is becoming and cannot be said to be mimicked by art, which coldly produces beings – still life – although at times, they may signal a favorable movement, just like a biohazard sign stuck in the ground can be a source of moving inspiration. Of course a sign in it's navigational sense and a gesture in any sense are rarely taken as representative. They invite or discourage.

It's not even the other way around, except when life and art are seen as synonyms – one theatre merely mimicking another with no sense of representation and only in this sense it can be said to be reproductive, but not of identities such as the cloning operations along any assembly line, be it academic or industrial. A better word would be "generative", since what is produced is always difference. It may merely be the play of otherness. Why then, asked Roger Caillois, wouldn't a moth disappear into the bark of a tree even when there is no wasp giving chase? Certainly not always the errors of paranoia! That itself may be the stand from the paranoia of eros, and quite unbecoming at that.

If the subject is the seed, the fragrance of tomorrow's lilac bush is irrelevant. Any modification of perspective transforms the subject into object. Any third position does the same regarding the other two. First, second and third are therefore equivalent and interchangeable, and even trialectics decomposes. The problem, of course, is the logo, lect or ligature misunderstood as the landscape or territory rather than the simulation, snapshot or map that they are.

One may merge with any traffic, but there are always off-ramps – a moth has wings (with or without cammo) – even if the exit is through the guard-rail, and without the security of a seat-belt, there's a chance one will be thrown from the vehicle before the fuel tank explodes on the rocks below. In either case, the lay-off may be no gentler than a certain resignation. To move or be moved is often the question, but what difference if the destination is the same?

Understanding's destination is truth, a stoppage or turning point. Nominalism only comes up with lists of names, jargon and talking points – the basis of applied journalism. Equipped therewith, one establishes leadership, only practical when there abound barbarians, unbelievers and heretics. The 'lazy' follower is part and parcel of that leadership, having the same intention, a delegation or relegation of "will" (or "perception", in the sense Aldous Huxley used it) in the interest of conservation ( – see 'blinders'), so presents no antagonistic distinction in the same way that the head and tail of an ass present no zoological contradiction so are never expected to transgress, much less revolt one over the other.

Without truth, morality disappears and without that hobgoblin, war and antagonism are meaningless outside the context of eating and being eaten, and whose result is still a mutual merger, a transformation on both counts. Like integrity and consistency, we should not confuse consciousness or awareness (even coupled to the memory of familiar sequences or patterns) with knowledge or truth. Only the former are provisional, and as Einstein warned, without an arrival and departure point, speed is irrelevant and time itself is always relative to one or another's standing still. Hegel gave us the dialectic, but Charles Fort corrected it with the hyphen. To wit, master-slave and slave-master are identical according to the principle of reversibility. This principle only states that if something appears uni-directionally linear like a geometrist's straight lines in empty space, there is somewhere an error in judgment or need for an optometrist. Even a crow doesn't fly as the crow flies; sometimes we just confuse one thing for the other when what it is – is no equivocation, it's just one-another, oui?.

Without the objectivity of the nominalists (or environmental vivisectionists), barbarians, unbelievers and heretics are just folks, unless, of course, they're also run-aways. But what's in a name? Clearly the manipulation of language is no justification, much less rationale for anything. Sometimes it's just fun. Altered states of consciousness are not achieved until one substance moves through the environment or its substance moves through you. Such is adaptation by any means you have selected. Just be careful what you wish for: hard enough, you'll likely get it.

"What exactly does this chorus mean? It means all that is possible to find in it. ...beyond the subject represented by the [word] "one," perhaps equally understood as being an outside observer (in this case, fully disapproving) and as being the subjective judgment of this youth (and, in this case, expressing a philosophically or cynically lucid satisfaction). All of this is true, one must not delete anything...

Each time – and this is quite frequent – that a word or a phrase has two possible meanings, one must recognize and maintain them both, because the phrase must be understood as entirely veracious in both senses. For the ensemble of the discourse, this also signifies: the totality of the possible meanings is its only truth.

...One must also sense that this is not a simple irony: must they ultimately be experienced as truly ironic? One must leave this doubt intact."

– Guy Debord

Some thi(ev)ery concerning signs and symbols, the former bearing the highest mysticism while the latter may be neither here nor there.

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."

– John Muir, 1869

'The human face is an empty power, a field of death ... after countless thousands of years that the human face has spoken & breathed one still has the impression that it hasn't even begun to say what it is & what it knows.'

— Antonin Artaud, July 1947.

William Blake said it well in "Auguries of Innocence":

"To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour."

– Apio Ludd

"When we see a person’s lips move and his tongue flap, we must decide whether what is coming out is ‘the universe expressing itself’, or some idiot rational plan that he has concocted."

– emile

Sometimes ambivalence is exchanged for indifference, as in "I don't give a hoot", and if said with sufficient snarl, demonstrates a moral (at base emotional) commitment against morality itself. Contradiction be damned – it proves nothing but the shackling of symbols to mathematical sign language or the prosaic death to symbolism masquerading as a technical journal or symbolic logic for the more spiritually minded. Each symbol must be kettled. Once identified, labeled or extracted from the symbolic milieu, a "symbol" is just another sign: each sign must point to the status quo, the material present. Anything else is called utopian fiction (although in some circles, "imagination" is not considered a defect)

Every epoch-defining revolution has simultaneously been a counter-revolution. Only the criterion (such as "iron" or "information") changes, making the epoch nothing but a value judgement wrapped around a talking point. What revolves has been the state ("the condition or state of affairs that currently exists") because at base, progress, consumerism and gentrification (here in the country, called "rural economic development") represent a single phenomenon – the suppression of symbolism is the death of community, itself a synonym of free association (in both material and linguistic senses).

In the 1920s, economists such as Paul Nystrom (1878–1969), proposed that changes in the style of life, made feasible by the economics of the industrial age, had induced to the mass of society a “philosophy of futility” that would increase the consumption of goods and services as a social fashion; an activity done for its own sake. In that context, “conspicuous consumption” is discussed either as a behavioural addiction or as a narcissistic behaviour, or both, which are psychologic conditions induced by consumerism — the desire for the immediate gratification of hedonic expectations."

– wiki: conspicuous consumption

The potential for rupture (which is to say "metamorphosis") in mid twentieth century Euroamerika was only a repetition of that which a full century earlier occurred on the Russian steppe, a terrain which looks even more familiar today. In the end, there has only been a single epoch, and historians, like theologians or other dogmatists have been correct to portray it as the only reality, but in geological time, six thousand years of civilisation only amounts to a nanosecond. History as media must exclude it's own subject matter to re-present each present age as the "Modern" one, unique above all others, a set of constrained symbols wrapped in gagetry, patriotism and war-mongering, because, after all, it's just got to get better.

Hence the nostalgia (or durative fetish) for failed revolutions is at the same time a longing for community, the renewal of openings, free-flowing symbolism oozing outside of transaction or economic/structural adjustments, poetry as subversive of institutions of exclusion, the embrace of ambiguity as a renewed interest in novelty, bringing possibility back into the cosmos:

"The inertia of objects is deceptive. The inanimate world appears static, “dead” to humans only because of our neuro-muscular chauvinism … Look deeper. You’ll need a magnifying glass … On the atomic and sub-atomic levels, weird electrical forces are crackling and flaring, and amorphous particles are spinning simultaneously forward and backward, sideways and forever at speeds so incalculable that expressions such as “arrival,” “departure,” and “have a nice day” become meaningless. It is on these levels that “magic” occurs.

The world is a wonderfully weird place, consensual reality is significantly flawed, no institution can be trusted, certainty is a mirage, security a delusion, and the tyranny of the dull mind forever threatens -- but our lives are not as limited as we think they are, all things are possible, laughter is holier than piety, freedom is sweeter than fame, and in the end it's love and love alone that really matters."

– Tom Robins, 1984, 2008

It is above all the form of the media, not the specific content, which has an ideological effect. The media’s specific informational content is subordinate to the function of producing consensus by deterring thought. Knowledge of the event as an aspect of life is prevented, creating an atmosphere of stupidity. Consensus functions by the exclusion of more radical others, and the mobilisation of resources to destroy them. It is achieved by powerlessness. The personal response, and responsiveness, is not possible in mass media. Disasters past and present are neutralised in a simple emotional response. Events like Live Aid involve viewers enjoying the spectacle of their own compassion."

– Functions of the media

"The University has always been, in some form or another, an institution for producing the ideological justifications, and consequently their material realisation, for the forces of the state, its image of splendour and the “happiness” of the ruling society. It has been as fundamental an aspect of class society as has been the dominant media: a society in which the ruling class speaks to, and tries to convince, itself and society generally in order to ever-perfect its forms of social control. Whilst academia’s differing illusions of “objectivity” and “neutral” acquisition of knowledge have changed and developed, along with its intake, over the centuries, its fundamental prop for this miserable world has always remained. So it should be no surprise that academia has produced more modern and subtler versions of how to preserve hierarchical order in the 21st century

The morality of breeding, and the morality of taming, are, in the means they use, entirely worthy of each other: we may proclaim it as a supreme principle that to make men moral one must have the unconditional resolve to act immorally. This is the great, the uncanny problem which I have been pursuing the longest: the psychology of the "improvers" of mankind. A small, and at bottom modest, fact — that of the so-called pia fraus [holy lie] — offered me the first insight into this problem: the pia fraus, the heirloom of all philosophers and priests who "improved" mankind. Neither Manu nor Plato nor Confucius nor the Jewish and Christian teachers have ever doubted their right to lie. They have not doubted that they had very different rights too. Expressed in a formula, one might say: all the means by which one has so far attempted to make mankind moral were through and through immoral.

– Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

...Let no-one say ideological work is the same as building work or working in a hospital or a call centre: the hierarchical division of labour has always meant that capitalism, even in its initial development, wasn’t just capital but was also an “ism”. It meant that, as well as an armed and economic force, it was also an ideology brutally materialised. Ideas for the ruling class, developed by professional intellectuals, were not merely ideas any more than religion, developed by the priesthood before the bourgeoisie, was merely religion.”

– Dialectical Delinquents

Religion (or philosophy, if that is your bent) and Science: non-overlapping magesteria? It's beginning to look like there was no separation in the first place! And they told us "Never the twain shall meet". One can never directly see one's own backside except through the eyes of another, and that's how we know it's there. Another word for majesty is despot. A dogmatist or expert is merely a know-it-all.

– more thi(ev)ery

The Smooth Transition & the Conservative Instinct

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

– Old Wives' Tale

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

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

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

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

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

– Encyclopedia of Nuisances

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

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

– emily d.

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

to attatch an absolute or only mildly relative value to a particular significatum which excludes other possibilities 'before' they come into focus, suggestive that the category or class has prior claims on 'reality' over its content or members;

to establish an identity between a significatum and the metaphor we use to bespeak it, thus creating a "dead metaphor";

to think of a process, experience or activity as if it were a "thing";

to confuse "subject-matter" (of discourse) with material object;

a matter of thingifying and arithmeticizing the universe, bringing it to a standstill, extinguishing meaningful possibility in favour of 'blind' convention, yet not by intention.

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

– Post-Structural Structures

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

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

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

– F. Nietzsche

Catastrophe and Implosion

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

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

– Barry Grey, Obama, Boehner pledge to continue talks on social cuts

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

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

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

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

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

– Andrew Robinson

How malicious philosophers can be!

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

– F. Nietzsche

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

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

– Sergius Stepniak

1: Decolonize the Operating system

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– emile

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4: Black Bloc

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

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

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

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

– Claire Fontaine, This is not the Black Bloc

More Fetish:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Constitutive Lack or Lack of Constituency?Deep structure is always injected just under the surface.

There is no irony in a constitutive lack: Standing together in absentia is no antagonism except between an ox and a moron, and that empty constitution can be a deadly simulacron whose hyper-reality is the schizophrenia of civilisation, depending as it does on eviscerating those who already have no stomach for it. If there is no center, there is no space for a master signifier – no deep structure, no operating system. Lack is (by definition) always an ex post facto destitution if not a positive refusal where the only absent presence is a void, not to be confused with a vacuum which is merely the flip side of gravity like suck and blow is to a straw. Antagonism (literally posited as the death instinct) is a stand against life such that arguments need no justification, being sufficient unto themselves like any proper fictional phantasm. It is not the antimagnetic repulsion or bounce of a back to back or belly to belly dance which may produce a gravitational spin and future entanglement which is also to say, if one is up on Poe, "electrifyingly shocking" and in no way lacking in possibility (see Pitter-patter & Pata Pata, where an exchange is never the intention nor an uncontested crossing of lines, and if that generation is antagonistic, where the fuck are the storks when we need them?).

"The imperative in Lacanian theory is to “accept” lack, whereas the logic of a non-mythical idea of contingency is to use opportunities for openness as a basis for creativity. The difference between mythical and non-mythical versions leads politically to the difference between acceptance of blockages and attempts to overcome them. Lacanian theories involve a strong commitment to slave morality, as exemplified by Laclau’s insistence that every chain of equivalence involve a unity against an external threat.

...Žižek’s “revolutionary” insistence on the need for masochistic selfdegradation,‘subjective destitution’ and identification with a Master and a Cause, not to mention his directly reactive insistence that self-awareness amounts to awareness of the negative, of death and trauma, prior to any active identification or articulation. This is a reterritorializing “contingency” which fits closely with the operation of capitalist ideology, where ‘under conditions we recognize as desperate, we are told to alter ourselves’, not the conditions,

...According to Deleuze, there are two models of contingency: the creative power of the poet, and the politician’s denial of difference so as to prolong an established order. It is for the latter that negation (lack) is primary, ‘as if it were necessary to pass through the misfortunes of rift and division in order to be able to say yes’. For the poet, on the other hand, difference is ‘light, aerial and affirmative’. ‘There is a false profundity in conflict, but underneath conflict, the play of differences’, differences which should be affirmed as positive and not overcoded by negativity

...‘Ours is no art of mutilation, but of excess, superabundance, amazement’, declares Hakim Bey. Though ‘truly fearful things’ exist in the world, they can perhaps be overcome - ‘on the condition that we build an aesthetic on the overcoming rather than the fear’ (1991, 37, 78). A constitutive “I-don’t-know”, if such a concept is thinkable, would involve precisely such a free play of differences, and not, to use Žižek’s term, the ‘good terror’ which ensures that this free play is brought to a halt."

– A. Robinson

see – The Political Theory of Constitutive Lack: A Critique