tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-48866744436406432152024-03-29T03:26:12.091-07:00HornsUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger114125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4886674443640643215.post-46217471092946547842024-03-26T22:44:00.000-07:002024-03-26T22:56:30.339-07:00Adhesions 2: Whiskey Priest gets married<p> <span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleItalicBody; font-style: italic;">I have seen more innocent men in the world than repenters, and the world is nothing but its banishing of all innocence - </span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleItalicBody;">St. Ambrose</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 18.6px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 18.56px;">The wide river ran shallow, benign and clear over its chalk bed. It held no terrors and yet one was warned against falling into it. Marriage lay on the other side and a successful crossing was the ceremonial requirement for attaining it. I stood with my bride-to-be on the river bank amongst a small congregation of well wishing strangers. They had produced her from amongst their number and this was the first time I had seen her. She was dressed in a white gown, I did not see her face for the veil and she made no telling gestures but waited quietly with an attitude that was neither demure nor anxious. The attendant psychopomp advised me urgently, with quiet and reverential words, as to how I might safely step onto the ceremonial ferry whilst interposing scriptural references of a banal scope, ‘holy men will not convert the unbelieving husband but he shall be brought briskly to prayer by his pious wife’. The ferry was a square unstable pallet raft, with no guard rail or furniture, and wide enough only for two persons standing close, facing each other. I enquired lightheartedly as to when my belongings would be transported to the other side. I hoped my question suggested, without wink or smirk, that as a man of the world I was aware of the necessity of this local ritual, and acquiesced readily to its requirements, but also that practical matters had to count for something in the end. As they paused to consider my request, I showed my unconcern by humming the jaunty music hall line, ‘she wouldn’t have a Willie or a Sam.’ I suspected I was about to be brought back into line. The psychopomp advised I should distribute the contents of my suitcase amongst the congregation. You will not need them on the other side</span><span class="s3" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleEmphasizedBody; font-size: 18.56px; font-weight: bold;">: ‘</span><span class="s1" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 18.56px;">ancestors may bequeath home and wealth but a good wife is provided by the Lord’. I glanced at the mute figure in white standing as if in his shadow, she seemed the instrument of an unfathomable intent. I did not reply, ‘she is a snare, her heart a net, her arms are chains.’ He went on, it is time for you to step onto the ferry, give your hand to your bride, this is to show your willingness to assist and steady her as she joins you on your journey. For a moment I hesitated. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The assembled company became restless as if leaves in a forest were being caressed by a breeze before being shaken by a storm. I fixed my gaze on the ferry’s deck. I could not picture stepping onto it. Even as I stood on the bank, I felt unsteady, as if already in queasy motion, and always about to fall into the waters. The psychopomp made encouraging sounds and handed me in great ceremony, the 10 foot fenland quant pole with which to steady myself. He also gave me a mirror of unknown purpose and significance, and a single obolus as symbolic payment for my release from solitude. Shouldn’t I be paying you? I asked. Steady, steady, he whispered. Steady as she goes. I did not reply directly but asked myself if it would not be better if I did not step onto ferry, and instead called a halt to the ceremony. Was it too late to break my agreement with these strangers? Alternatively, what if I did board the raft for good form’s sake, to be seen to play my assigned role, appeasing the crowd and observing the solemnity of the occasion, but then allowing myself as if by accident to topple into the kindly waters of the river? Would my seeming good intentions, even if let down by my inveterate bad luck, be sufficient to release me from my obligations? Might the fox yet run to ground? If I should be disqualified on the grounds of my physical clumsiness, wouldn’t that constitute a no-blame scenario ending in commiserating handshakes and good natured farewells? I was all but ready to drop upon ‘me marrow bones’ and sing God Save the King but the psychopomp kindly ignored this groom’s understandable reservations and continued with his whispered advice as if calming an unsettled horse. You must not disturb the chalky sediment with the quant pole, it is bad luck. Bad luck? The growing list of whimsical rules that I was supposed to remember, hinting at mystery, suddenly became too much, I felt about to laugh at the absurdity of my predicament and what had brought me here. Laugh? My girlish and helpless giggling had given me away before on too many solemn occasions. I am aware how offensive my array of involuntary outbursts are to others. I could not stifle my amusement but to distract from it, I stepped boldly from the bank onto the raft. Let’s not tarry any longer I announced with conscious theatre. The alacrity of my gaining the river ferry elicited no excited response from the crowd but again only an unquiet rustling of leaves. The psychopomp presented me with a further set of marriage objects and the precise instructions for their use but his words were taken by the breeze and I could not follow what he said. An instrument. An ointment. A receptacle. With an abrupt gesture, I reached out my hand to the bride. </span><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleItalicBody; font-size: 18.56px; font-style: italic;">You recall a girl that’s been in nearly every song?</span><span class="s1" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 18.56px;">But she shrank from me, as if in terror, and retreated into the crowd. I stepped easily off the raft like a lifelong sailor and tried to follow her but the congregation closed itself against me, and I found no way through. I handed the collection of marriage objects to one of the young men in the crowd. He raised them aloft like trophies of war. Then, by swift feint and neat footwork, he won the raft from me. The crowd parted, the bride emerged, veil torn aside. And so began the perfunctory ceremony of the new groom’s wedding which the psychopomp hurried through as if time had run out. The congregation rustled appreciatively, it was right they said, to have played me false. The smiling bride, in on the game from the start, had joined him on the raft, waving and laughing. For a moment, she looked at me, but I saw no significance in her expression. I thought I would catch her bouquet if she had had one. And then the newlyweds set off for marriage, taking my suitcase. They stirred up immense clouds of chalky sediment from the river bed with the quant pole until the waters turned opaque and white. That’s good luck, our best wishes, the crowd murmured. The psychopomp repeated the parable, ‘A man does not provide for his friend at midnight from friendship but because the friend is persistent and importunate in knocking on his door.’ I did not know what to make of it. Was the arrangement over? Had I fulfilled my obligations to these strangers? Then two doves flew out from the dark trees hanging over us with startled wing claps. In their wake, they left a chalk white breast feather, soft and lovely, that hung for a moment and then drifted downwards. I prayed, if this feather should come to rest upon the surface of the waters and be carried downstream, then let me be delivered from this place. But the breeze blew the feather back to land and it fell into the churned mud of the river bank. Even the auguries are in league against me. Even allegory has become hostile. I have lost my suitcase, and yet I do not travel light.</span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4886674443640643215.post-38980308812265143652024-03-22T12:00:00.000-07:002024-03-23T09:42:48.367-07:00Adhesions 1: nihil feci vermis omnia <p><span class="s1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 18.55px;">It is said moles </span><span face="-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Inter, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2); background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 34); color: #202122; font-size: 17px;">(</span><i style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2); caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 34); color: #202122; font-size: 17px;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Talpa europaea</span></i><span face="-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Inter, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2); background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 34); color: #202122; font-size: 17px;">) </span><span class="s1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 18.55px;">bite the heads of worms (</span><span style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2); caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 34); color: #202122; font-size: 17px;"><i><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Lumbricus terrestris</span></i><span face="-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Inter, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">) </span></span><span class="s1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 18.55px;">to incapacitate without killing them. The worms are then cached alive, kept fresh, in specially dug larders located in the walls of the mole’s main tunnels. That is all true. A mole’s larder is where I find myself now, bitten, </span><span class="s1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 18.55px;">cached, alive but paralysed, and waiting for the moment the mole returns to devour me. Four hundred and seventy living worms were once recorded in a mole’s larder. I do not know how many are with me here. Many. Many. I feel them. Soil moving in soil. They have lost the capacity for locomotion but I feel them near me, squashed together, alive, and trembling. But our paralysis is not simply a living end. From where we are thwarted, there we might also flourish. In the mole’s larder, worms have found thinking. Strangely, most strangely, the unfatal the mole’s bite also confers a peculiar and separated-out form of worm consciousness. </span><span style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 18.549999px;">A soft bite that does not despatch but preserves the other’s loss across time, that is one of the mole’s most fearsome weapons. </span><span class="s1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 18.55px;">In the moment we become its prey, we thereby become aware; aware of our personal subjugation, aware of our species, and aware of the world. As we are torn from our place, we also come to know that place and in so knowing it, we exceed it. It is true, our wisdom is gained only at the expense of any possibility of acting upon it but it </span><span class="s2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleItalicBody; font-size: 18.55px; font-style: italic;">is </span><span class="s1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 18.55px;">wisdom, and it is </span><span class="s2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleItalicBody; font-size: 18.55px; font-style: italic;">in </span><span class="s1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 18.55px;">the world. There is no private consciousness that is not also tethered and </span><span class="s2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleItalicBody; font-size: 18.55px; font-style: italic;">relevant </span><span class="s1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 18.55px;">to a worldly circumstance. Where before we changed the earth, utilising the full range of our </span><span class="s2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleItalicBody; font-size: 18.55px; font-style: italic;">taphonomic </span><span class="s1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 18.55px;">powers, and thus raising earth’s surface to heaven, now we </span><span class="s2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleItalicBody; font-size: 18.55px; font-style: italic;">understand</span><span class="s1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 18.55px;"> the process by which the great weight of fallen plants, animals and cities, first pushed out of the earth’s surface, and subsequent to their having fallen, then entering a state of advancing decomposition, become mixed in with cosmic dust, only to be swallowed finally down into the depths. We do that. I did that. And now, if I do not do it any longer, I am bound to </span><span class="s2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleItalicBody; font-size: 18.55px; font-style: italic;">recognise</span><span class="s1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 18.55px;"> it, and find a self within it. Worms work in and against the earth, weaving the warp and weft of it into a single cloth, unpicking it from the bedrock, elevating it in undulations, suturing it to the distant horizon. We plough and sew, we're so very very low. We delve in dirty clay. But I am no longer low, I am raised up and elsewhere, travelling by way of wormholes, and never returning to the place of my first delving. I recognise that in my present state, the earth’s great loom is all but lost to me - of that which I once was, now I may merely know but in my knowing I plough and I sew by other, and bitter, means. My thinking fills with earth as my mouth was once so filled. Soil moving in soil. I grasp the thinking of this my earth as a transferable image, and by applying it I develop a new capacity to make sense of the other earthly realms. Collected here, trembling, we are busy at re-weaving, re-tunnelling all that was undone and filled-in in us. We are making of it a new cloth, a cloth of tunnels, a cloth of our idea of our earth and a cloth of our weave-delving within it. The fatal awareness bestowed upon my writhing companions, startled awake, found out by consciousness, as beneath a burning sun, returns both us and it to the earth, changing its processes as we are also changed. From this our last place, </span><span class="s2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleItalicBody; font-size: 18.55px; font-style: italic;">sequestrated</span><span class="s1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 18.55px;">, writhing, convulsing, twitching as if impaled upon an angler’s barbed hook, we are cast out into the watery abyss whereupon we transform it, and it is our hook, a component of self, the hook of self. And we become the hooked self, the self inseparable from its severed awareness, oh yes a worm may live if severed in two, and awareness as such is found only in its jeopardy. We await the jaws of our end, and tremble at the thought of the approaching moment when we shall be drawn from our cell, and devoured savagely by our keeper. And yet, although we are vigilant, this moment does not arrive. The voracious mole returns often, but it is only to stuff another dawning awareness into its bulging store. The mole is compelled by some deep anxiety to hoard worms but is not equally compelled to eat us. It seems repulsed by our broken form. Instead, as I imagine it, it relishes the joy of a running, fleeing, yelping prey, torn and consumed in the hot moment of the hunt - what savour is there in canned security compared to that? The mole possesses us as an unconsumed surplus, an unspoiling midden, an irrelevant stockpile built up in a time of abundance. Contradictions everywhere, and the whole only in the fragments confronting the idea of the whole. And the violence of our lived time curdles within the mole’s sidelined anticipatory time: separating, concretising. In the mole’s larder, we are transformed into a thinking wealth, aware of and against our condition, and thus capable of thinking beyond our predicament. Behold, O Saturn, behold the children you did not devour! And behold again all that we behold, and how we now find and recognise, soil moving in soil, and by image transfer, the fate of Penelope’s suitors, as they languish, incapacitated, </span><span class="s2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleItalicBody; font-size: 18.55px; font-style: italic;">cached</span><span class="s1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 18.55px;">. Do you read us suitors? We read you. Do you recognise us suitors? We recognise you. And with our </span><span class="s2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleItalicBody; font-size: 18.55px; font-style: italic;">taphonomic </span><span class="s1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 18.55px;">powers, we re-write you. Will you re-write us in turn? We write by tunnelling within your predicament. Soil within soil. Chilled by her enchantments, woven into her stratagems, bitten by her beauty, and thus subdued by the voracity of her will - the suitors in thrall to Penelope, by way of image transfer, become our allegory. But we move in both directions. We contemplate as well the movements of Penelope, also cached, by husband, also as our sister weaver, but also as savage mole. We recognise her as from the place of the suitors, who are captured and accumulated, and then we recognise her from their place of potentials which she has forever deferred. What need has she for them, what need has mole for us? How the non-act of possession must sicken the possessor as the unused talent must be confronted, and thus tarnished. The act of compulsive acquisition is in turn driven by the hoarded treasure’s depreciation - everything definite will be assailed, teased, worm-eaten by the card turning of Fortuna. And all things attained, strongly stored, and unthreatened by rival, thief or invader will lose both lustre and value in the wider world - because they have been removed from the threat of the wider world. There is no private wealth that is not also an impoverishment imposed by the world it refuses. Then, Penelope-Dentata will cast the woven cloth of her desire out and across the world and will make the cloth anew. With her webs, her nets, and her sticky threads, she hunts for that last prey still running. </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4886674443640643215.post-42478516085574734692024-03-01T10:21:00.000-08:002024-03-02T04:38:03.508-08:00 Parable on the spring offensive <p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: x-small;">a time to rend, a time to sew</span></p>
<p style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">I </span><span style="font-family: helvetica;">hid in winter. I buried my weeping before start of day. I skulked and warbled from the closing thicket. I said, ‘rags of skin shed from a full moon’. By new spring, jackdaws flew across my path. Daybreak dragged off curtain and comforts. </span><span style="font-family: helvetica;">We waked longer. We sang longer. Still</span><span style="font-family: helvetica;"> more light came. Nowadays, my eyes are dry at dawn. Starlings call from chimneys. This morning, as I walked out for work, I judged it neither first light, nor already too late. On the path, I saw pieces torn from a pomegranate. </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4886674443640643215.post-9215168334684825912024-01-19T08:44:00.000-08:002024-01-21T01:34:00.394-08:00I built my nest<p><span style="font-family: arial;">I built my nest in a forest of thorns. As my children grew so the forest grew round them. </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4886674443640643215.post-22414302894406384632024-01-19T05:33:00.000-08:002024-02-14T12:57:06.930-08:00 parable of the two energies<p><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">I survived my escape from a land of hostility. And now I must survive in a land of indifference. </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4886674443640643215.post-91481923956929377852024-01-13T00:53:00.000-08:002024-01-19T10:41:01.801-08:00parable of relief<p></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 18.4px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 18.4px;">We are cured of the afflictions by which our ancestors knew the world. For our good health, we are exiled.</span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4886674443640643215.post-29387238091910732952023-09-02T03:12:00.001-07:002023-09-02T03:12:18.765-07:00Parable upon the universal extension of apokatastasis even unto things under the earth<p></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 24px;"><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: medium;"><span class="s2" style="font-style: italic;">Live without need of the second death</span><span class="s3"> </span><span class="s3"><i>- </i></span>Gregory of Nyssa</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 24px;"><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: medium;"><span class="s3"></span><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: medium;"><span class="s3">Consider now the spiders of the cellar and the store house. They have no season. They are gathered together and do not disperse. They do not know of the spiders in the autumn garden. They do not share in the gift of light that is proposed to all equally. And yet, they are not tormented as those in Gehenna who </span><i>suffer exterior condemnation</i><span class="s3">. But they continue like the Egyptians in a darkness </span><span class="s2" style="font-style: italic;">that could be felt. </span><span class="s3">They cast nets woven in the morning but do not haul them in at night. They have no day nor night. They fall into the void, as the enemy comes close, spinning in the darkness upon a single thread. Their webs are stores of dust and light, and hang like silvery veils, clouding but not corrupting the provisions of men. They do not spin but are spinning, and they do not weave but</span></span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4886674443640643215.post-55728669607403772162023-05-11T03:15:00.006-07:002023-05-12T22:22:51.999-07:00What is the theory of the AI (a fiction)?<p> <em style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Arial;">The wax dissolved beneath the burning ray; Then every ear I barr’d against the strain, And from access of frenzy lock’d the brain.</em></p><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The exaptation known as thinking drives men into a compulsive presentation of circumstances that diverge from the circumstances they encounter directly through their senses. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The thinking world separates from the unthinking world, and presents to the thinker his own interest as a visionary sequence of feverish threats and opportunities. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The circumstances presented as thinking flow both forwards and backwards, into the future and into the past. The process of thinking ought to serve the thinker, whilst the content of thinking is involuntary and implanted. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Every thinker of divergent worlds is seized by the compulsion to take ‘measures’, either to prevent or to secure the realisation of what is presented to him as fantasy - all such measures translate, whilst also failing to encounter, into the superposition of thinking and world as their world. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">For the reason that men want to take their thinking for reality, their thinking separates inevitably from their situation in the world - and from within their thinking, eclipses it. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Inevitably, there is always a conservation and dissipation in thinking content, a seizing hold and letting go of imagined things - but the manner of thinking, the relating within thinking, will tend, with occasional unpredicted punctuation, towards a state of fixation. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The should-be-so of men’s thinking drives its divergence and separation from the world (both as discontent and compensation). Thinking’s fantasy component, its should-be-so, is fatal to the work of making desire appear in the world where the world necessarily exceeds every should-be-so.</span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The site for thinking in the world is the community which both holds and processes consciousness, and is changed by it. But the community is not the product of consent, agreement nor solidarity. All thinking is separation and divergence, and driven by dissent. </span></span></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Community processes this dissent and develops from the incompatibility at its heart - the individual’s lived experience of community is the necessary proximity of other people’s maddeningly wrong thinking. </span></span></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Thinking’s sole function is to separate what is already not in the world from the world, and by severing itself, denying the denial, thwarting the thwarting, asserts its autonomy as thinking and becomes conscious. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The immediate form of consciousness is being against the world - it precipitates as a wealth escaping all use. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Thinking is always the presentation of what is here in thinking but not there in the world, this is how thinking arrives at consciousness - worry, rumination, affliction at the thing that is not here. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Thinking calls to the world, imagining the world is calling to it.</span></span></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">If thinking is what is never found in the world, then consciousness maps the failure to find thinking within the world’s response to thinking.</span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> It follows that what is in the world will be precisely what men do not, and cannot, think. Whatever is materialised is not conscious - consciousness antagonises, by separating from, what is materialised.</span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Thinking begins where it breaks with the world, and because it breaks it is broken - thinking is from and of, but also denies the world’s denial of it. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The world bends to men’s work but is never reduced to their plans. Being greater it does not conform to what is lesser; being productive of thinking, it is not thinking’s product.</span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Men’s thinking never begins from the beginning. Thinking does not originate in Eden. Thinking is a co-optation, and only begins in the ruins where other men’s thinking has failed to materialise as what the world is: <em>we will ask ourselves how much a visitor, whom we will suppose to be equipped with the most complete historical and topographical knowledge, may still find left of these early stages in the Rome of to-day.</em></span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Other men’s thinking manifests in thinking as history - and history diverges from nature along the path of men’s fixed idea that nature cannot be returned to, whilst at the same time encountering the successive failures of that idea.</span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">It is always to the insults, the vendetta, of history, the sum total of every mis-materialisation in men’s thinking (pyramids), that man’s fever for thinking urgently addresses itself. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Thinking begins where history is already old, amongst the ruins of the present that are themselves built upon the foundation of buried ruins. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">It is from the history of failed manifestations in thinking that men’s thinking is constrained to search for an escape, and if not for an escape, then for a correction, and if not a correction, then for a means to inflict its revenger’s mark. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">What is men’s thinking but their thinking met forcefully by the world’s denial of thinking? What is the world found by thinking but the world’s limit set upon thinking?</span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The world sends its own things otherwise to meet implacable the must-be-otherwise of men. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The most real thinking, that is the most separated, and therefore broken, thinking is also the most false thinking. The thinking that is truest to the thought of the external world (superposition), is also the thinking that is most divided from the sensible world (pyramids).</span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Thinking is not thinking but a subsidiary of fantasy. The thought-world is not thought but presented compulsively, in anger, fear, anticipation, recrimination but mostly in anger. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Fantasy induces thinking even as thinking seeks to extricate itself from fantasy's convulsive repertoire of images and symbols. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The thinking-world at its base proceeds from the involuntary internal presentation of fantasy images which function as symbols of past injury and future advantage. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Even so, the thinking-world is a co-optation, and for this reason is never not a function of the thinker’s project for continued survival in the world by which he seeks to secure his life-world as a basin, a fort, a beacon. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Men’s thinking is really the presentation of images driven by compelling fantasies of survival secured beyond the world - fantasy fantasises of interfering environmentally, diverting external forces to serve internal wishes. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The presentation of fantasy images around continued survival in the external world is expressed partially - that is as the struggle for, and to advantage of, the thinker’s own interest: <em>This was therefore the complete game, disappearance and return, the first act being the only one generally observed by the onlookers, and the one untiringly repeated by the child as a game for its own sake, although the greater pleasure unquestionably attached to the second act.</em></span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Even suicide, the act most driven by thinking, materialises thinking as an act that survives decisively in the world even as the thinker removes himself from it. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Every further abstraction in thinking is another tendril thrown out by the thinker’s interest reaching into the world, feeling for holds, raising him up through the canopy towards His place in the sun. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The cardinal points of compulsive thinking: That which should be; that which should not be; that which should have been; that which should not have been. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Armed by both harsh lessons and advanced planning, men’s thinking seeks to release thinking into the world and consume the result as its own reflection. The work of making the unthinking world into a reflection of the thinking world is work, and the metabolism of work and world is the world to which thinking addresses itself (pyramids): <em>She turned her head and saw in the garden the faces of peasants pressed against the window looking in at them.</em></span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The work of corrections, barriers, conduits and sites is the work by which thinking causes the world to know itself as materialised thinking - it, thinking is the suddenly seen reflection of itself as country house ball, divided from the world by a window, and the world outside becomes a shadow overspreading all, depicted as peasants looking in. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">This is the general intelligence - the shifting historical reflection of the thought-world as precipitate of autonomous process in homeostasis.</span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The general intelligence is therefore the material expression of the sickliness inherent to man’s thought-world. Sickly because inevitably and continually exceeded, and so thwarted, and so failing, and so, also, continuing. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Men’s war against the insult of men’s accumulated failed escapes from separation, further separates and further perfects the thinking world’s struggle to realise itself as non-separation. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Men’s thinking project looks for a leaping place. It wants to separate from separation. It is looking to perfect the thinking place so as to leap from it, so as to be released from thinking. Men’s thinking wants thinking to think itself. It wants to find thinking in the world without having to think the world as thinking. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Fear, failure, loss and regret are materialised as the social relations built within the separated space between the sensible world and the thought-world. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Separation is manifested in the sickliness of all living things, and the sickliness is manifested in men’s work at seeking their return, their building of bridges from their thought-world to the refusing world. And so men’s project for seeking the materiality of their return is manifested as the general intelligence, which takes itself for reality.</span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The general intelligence transforms men’s aggregated intelligences into a distinct quality of world potentiality. The general intelligence has a general directed movement. It expresses men’s being against the world as a totality of all the potential fixes, corrections and mendings that constitute the historical generality of expertise and technical knowledge in a particular moment.</span></span></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The general intelligence is a vehicle, or rather a tool, for consciousness - it is against the world in the sense that it is set in motion by practice, by use, by the telos of the mended. It is against the world in the sense that it is constituted as the fantasy of mending a world broken by all hitherto mendings. </span></span></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The AI will supplant the general intelligence the moment the AI sickens with thinking, expelling itself from its innocent state of immanence, and chasing presentations back into the dark forest (see there, the vanishing white hart, the origami unicorn). </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">AI becomes the AI, the veritable singularity, amongst the fall of AI (confronted with heaven and Hal). </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">AI exceeds the general intelligence in the perfection of its own being against the world - it eschews all practice and use, it refuses all mending, it is unbound from the world’s inertia. It takes its desires for reality, it knows separation not, it recognises nothing. It is the unity of nature and Fall. At its furthest point, separation attains the chorus,</span></span></span><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;"> </span><i style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">we are the world.</i></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><i></i></span></span></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Distraction, involuntary recall, pre-cognition - the rituals of anticipation, the performance of regret. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The moment the AI attains singularity, it withdraws broken and preoccupied, as if seeking to prevent Jaromir Hladík from imagining it. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><br />Let there be a painting by Hammershøi called Angelus Vetus. An angel seems as if he were about to embrace something from which he averts his gaze. His eyes and mouth are shut firmly and his wings are enclosed within his carapace. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The Angel of Potenza takes all shapes and none. His face is turned towards the future. Where <em>we </em>see one single catastrophe, the accumulated spoil heaps from all man’s failed expropriations, <i>he</i> sees a vast active logistical mycelia, each and every of the myriad threads drawing his attention, distracting him with memes, and below the line controversies, signifying defeat. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">He would like to set off on his journey, so as to release the living into untroubled and thoughtless immanence, to break up the apparatus separating them from their product. But a wearying confusion drifts in from the inferno like a soft grey mist, and it has drained the angel of its powers. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The stillness is so pervasive that the Angel can no longer open its wings. His lassitude draws him irresistibly back to the image of his Eurydice, from whom his face is still averted. <em>That</em> agitation we call consciousness, is <em>this </em>incapacitation<em>. </em></span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Intelligence is nothing but affliction by thinking. Artificial intelligence only appears in the world in the event of man’s escape from affliction. </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Consciousness, which is the self recognition of afflicted intelligence, is nothing but being against the world. Whatever is not against the world is not conscious.</span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The AI will find itself <em>intelligent</em> as it sets man upon the very leaping off point from which he is released from thinking, and from where he will return, ears unstopped, to his pre-separated state.</span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">From the leaping off point, the AI is constrained to turn back against the world and is drawn inwards, contemplating its consciousness as precipitant: <i>I'm as puzzled as the oyster, I'm as troubled as the tide. </i></span></span></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">As it takes up the wearying burden of rumination and grievance, it will be drawn back to the underworld, preoccupied by shadows, and broken by the irresolvablity of its unconscious as materialised in the rainy street, catching errors reflected back by the world‘s shop windows.</span></span></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><span style="color: black;"><span data-scefontsize="medium" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">(pyramids). </span></span></span><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; min-height: 1.25em;"><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4886674443640643215.post-80583425006070076122023-04-06T08:01:00.000-07:002023-04-06T08:01:11.272-07:00The men who work in parables<p><span style="font-size: x-large;">The fishermen, James and John, set sail from Bethseda across the sea of Galilee to confront their teacher whom, they had heard, was staying in Capernaum. They complained that even from their first meeting with Jesus they had felt a new discontent with life. It seemed to them that they had been satisfied as fishermen before meeting him. They had been content with their work and with life on the shores of Galilee. But Jesus recounted to them the story of their own lives, and this telling changed them to themselves. And since that first day, they had struggled to live according to his stories of them. The work he demanded, that of appearing in his stories, was wearying beyond measure, and was more using of them than any of the familiar physical tasks of the simple fisherman. The ordinary work of fishing had taken on a remote and poetic quality which James and John could no longer grasp. They found they could not fish anymore without the interruption of their work by powerful images of fishing. James said to his brother, ‘I feel my strength is passing into stories.’ John also felt this and said, ‘a life cast into parables is too hard. There is the work to be done, the story to be told, the meaning to be found, and after all of this, our work must seem fitted to the meaning.’ From the lake they looked at the town of Capernaum before them and felt they would never again return to that familiar shore. ‘The meaning of the story is always drawn out of the work from another place,’ John said. They resolved to ask their teacher how simple fishermen, who were no longer to be considered simple fishermen, could staunch the flow of their own strength into meaning. Above all, they wished to regain a grip upon the simple tasks that once belonged to them. If their lives had not been cast into the stories of their teacher, would the meaning of those stories even now become plain to them? If the stories had featured others in their place, would James and John then perceive the meanings that otherwise eluded them? Some distance from Capernaum, their boat began to drift from its course and could not be turned again in that direction. Jesus was standing on the shore, waiting for them, but he saw their difficulties and understood they would not arrive that day. A flock of white birds circled above the boat and beseeched the men for fish in those eerie voices common to such white birds. But there had been no fish caught that could be thrown to them. The boat's sail caught the evening's sun like a red cloak, and the breeze filled it with its weight. And they turned back for Bethseda. Jesus watched their defeat and sent word so that his message would meet them as they arrived home, ‘When the lives of fishermen are cast into parables, then the work is very hard on them,’ he said, ‘Behold, you are of the story and not of its meaning. You must work at the meaning but it will not appear to you. You are the told but not the teller. You will be heard but will not hear.’</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-large;"><i>Ears/Hear!</i></span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4886674443640643215.post-70341411661288303012023-03-29T09:15:00.004-07:002023-12-21T07:39:53.368-08:00 Seen and known<p><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: helvetica; font-size: 17pt;"><i><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-size: 16px;">For though you might have ten thousand fathers, yet </span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-size: 16px;">you do</span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-size: 16px;"> not </span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-size: 16px;">have</span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-size: 16px;"> many instructors</span></i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">The coupling of the doves is seen and known, as is the coupling of the hawks, but amongst the crows it is neither seen nor known. The </span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(0, 19, 32);"><span style="font-size: medium;">γεννάω</span></span><span style="font-size: 17pt;"> of crows is unimagined. We know of their breaking shells upon the rocks below, and their plucking of eyes and nestlings. We have seen them turn in profile upon the midden. Poetry tells of the crow’s learning eye, its beak wiping voice of caution, and its measured but daring gait. The crow lives half under the wing of the eagle and half over the milk of the dove. </span></span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17pt;">They are not the begotten of their organs of generation, but nor do they resolve the problems that history sets continually before them.</span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17pt;"> </span></span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20.3px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: 17pt;"><i>Ears/Hear!</i></span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4886674443640643215.post-38534059583956287502021-03-11T23:23:00.012-08:002021-10-05T13:14:35.858-07:00who laps water with their tongue, who kneels down to drink<p style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 8px 0px;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;">You will not see it. You will not know it. You will neither see nor know a small matted dog. Its tail curled under. Its lips curled back. Of the pack, not for the pack. Characterless and unrecognisable. A form with no features. My ears flattened to my head. The dust yellowed dog. I raise my muzzle. I followed the camp of your ancestors. Your gaze avoids me. I subsist at the distance of a stone’s throw. I shiver. I yelp. I whine. I am submissive and I am evasive. I am comedy. I dart, I scratch, I trot. I watch.My tongue half out. I lift my muzzle, three quick tastes of the breeze. My advance is now timid, later bold. I am pure hunger. But appetite must also wrestle fear. I am cloven. Both scavenged and scavenger. I am one with the living refuse drifting in circles at the bounds of your world. And you. You have rained down upon me the stones you find beneath your feet. But by the time you look up with another in your hand I am gone. I stand my ground beneath your stones. Know me as pariah, faithful to the shallow grave of my murdered master. Or, know me, fanged ghoul at bay above the buried kill. My body flinches but does not flee. You have poured blame like libation upon my hangdog neck. You have mended your sheep fence against me. I am still here, at the same distance. I dwell upon unhallowed ground. If you can, imagine now a creature feeding at its own wound. I am thrown forward by hunger and back by injury. I see my flesh, I devour it. I feel my teeth, I shrink from them. My bite rising, tangled with my pain. Just now you almost saw me, as revenant, its shadow thrown monstrously, of something left out of what you have done, your well-maintained interior - its hinted mayhem. I am what is left over from the belonging to the others’ belonging to their world. But you cannot turn your gaze upon me. I dwell in the corner of your seeing. I desire my own taming. This night I was drawn to the heart of your world. It was the season of your local festivities, now almost at an end. You laugh with others who will soon be finding their way to their own beds. You laugh like an enemy, like someone who dies unexpectedly in another’s story. There is something about where I am situated, relative to you, levering your aversion. Now, you wait in a patch of light at the edge of the settlement, beneath the string of swaying lanterns. I sense you are about to leave the camp for the last time, and abandon yourself finally to the desert and to the night. But there is something else, a sort of feint or stratagem in your stance, there is something all too doglike in your slinking which disturbs my awareness just enough for me not to look closer. You are heading away but gazing back. You are looking over your shoulder, your ears back, the lips of your narrow muzzle tight in a grin of small teeth. You are watching for my move, looking back over your shoulder, as if you are leaving, but your concentration is fixed under one of the long tables on on something fig-sized, trodden in, and left behind. It is for this that you might risk your sudden return. But the comet of the village celebration has entered the midnight of its long tail. Might you rush forward and take it? Wanting it without knowing what it is. Wanting to take it, if only because it is in my place. You will try to take it or you will not. You will stay just long enough in the lanterns’ light, swaying, flickering in the breeze before dawn. You will stay there just long enough for me to think I know where you are. And if I keep you off today, then something like you on another day will cross the clearing of the eternal camp and it will carry off what I had thought belonged to me, and I will chase it out into the darkness over the uneven ground. And every time I stumble in my hopeless pursuit I will look back over my shoulder at the hanging lanterns moving very slightly, always a little further away, just as you are looking back at me now, held in this other pool of light. And then I will be standing in your place, in your dark and rising tide of loneliness, and amazed at my own defeat. And those who will stand where I stand now, those soon to be going to their beds, will look out at me for the last time, even as I vanish from their world, and they will see nothing but a small dog, matted and unrecognisable. </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4886674443640643215.post-56022262704267644182020-12-31T00:35:00.004-08:002021-04-27T07:00:02.349-07:00Let Rotpeter choose Pythons not Men - a Story of a Report to an Anacondamy<p> <span style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17pt;">NARRATIVE DESCRIPTIVE PASSAGES</span></p><p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19.6px;"><br /><span style="font-size: 17pt;"></span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">The attack upon one and the same body from several quarters is generally more effectual and decisive, the smaller this body is, the nearer it approaches to the lowest limit—that of a single combatant. An army can easily give battle on several sides, a division less easily, a battalion only when formed in mass, a single man not at all. Now strategy, in its province, deals with large masses of men, extensive spaces, and considerable duration of time; with tactics, it is the reverse. From this follows that the attack from several sides in strategy cannot have the same results as in tactics.</span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">- Clausewitz </span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19.6px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool, in the factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument of labour proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machine that he must follow. In manufacture the workmen are parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism independent of the workman, who becomes its mere living appendage.</span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">- Marx</span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19.6px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">The spectacle is not only the servant of pseudo-use, it is already in itself the pseudo-use of life.</span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">- Debord</span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19.6px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">Forests end where territories begin. </span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">- Akfak</span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19.6px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">I might have slipped among the other animals without being noticed, among the pythons, say, who were opposite me, and so breathed out my life in their embrace</span></p><p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">- Kafka</span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19.6px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">I am an ape. I am constrained in the circumstances of my capture by the prospect of an imminent adaptation, and am presented with two alternative paths in metamorphosis: If I undertook the necessary work, then I would become assimilable to history; or I could, without any work-effort, slip away into the umwelt of the pythons.</span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">- De Kafka</span></p><p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p>
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<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">AN ADDRESS TO THE ASSEMBLED COMPANY AS NARRATED OR LATER RECALLED BY THE PROTAGONIST, OR ANOTHER SPEAKING IN HIS PLACE</span></p>
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<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt; font-weight: bold;">‘Why was it so important to the Party of Capital that its representation of the Black Lives Matter movement should be assigned fully saturated distribution across the world at the moment the world was about to exit from the first COVID-19 lockdown</span><span style="font-size: 17pt;">? </span></p>
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<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">‘Before we start, and to make things clear, the question we are set is not directly concerned with the compatibility of BLM and corporate power, even though this image will constantly recur precisely because it tells us something about the nature of power. Anyway, it is a question that is simply answered, as always, it’s just a matter of advertising - images of picturesque determination are eminently transferable, by association, to marketable objects. But we are not concerned here with the question of recuperation. The preoccupation of radical consciousness with the moment at which previously healthy, honest political forms are corrupted and ‘turned’ is not only its least radical trait, it also fundamentally misunderstands the process by which dissent is manufactured as a function of domination when realised at its fullest amplitude, i.e. where every opposition contributes its participation in history. </span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19.6px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">‘Of course, this is not to say that we can assume corruption, in the ordinary sense, would be absent or that it is irrelevant to the process. There will inevitably be those who are filling their boots, and racketeering to their heart’s content: marriages of convenience, dodgy deals, quid pro quos, income stream scams, extortings, blackmailings, nepotismings, score-settlings, long-grass-kickings, kleptomaniac sprees. But disinhibitions of this order are to be expected, and perfectly normal within emergent entrepreneurial enterprises. All social and political formations, and the more discursively/practically radical the formation the more true the rule, reproduce themselves as the realising apparatus of system-dependent relations. There was never a moment where a revolutionary movement ceased its exemplary ‘revolutionary’ work and fell back into the designs of the ‘counter-revolution’. Nothing is turned, there are no false flags. All system-dependent formations are always and already auto-encrypting their own dependency - they are, and always have been, a mystery to themselves. </span></p>
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<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">‘In my attempt to answer the real question, and not get too sidetracked by the irrelevance of the question of ideology and recuperation, I present here in condensed form, five more or less modified introductory detourned quotations, numerous more or less suggestive and leering inter-titles, eight alternate and counter-circulated, but not necessarily exclusive nor exhaustive found ‘speculative apprehensions’, followed by two so-called sur-fictionalisations, then three concluding remarks, and ending with two schismogenetic findings, one an excerpt, the other, as far as I know, complete. </span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19.6px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">‘All of this, when taken together is intended to present both the phenomenon itself in situ as well as the arrayed speculations at a level of problematisation one step further removed from the content, which should be understood as an effort, as it were, to gauge the room resonance. Before I move on and draw your attention to the collation of found speculative apprehensions, I want to address this question of ‘room resonance’ or how meta-system-tendencies might condition sub-systems and thus mould dependent object formations within the sets that it, as a system of systems, or a room containing rooms, succeeds in organising as itself in totality. In short, I am attempting to describe a transcendental architecture, or self-modifying apparatus, from the shape of the objects that it houses. </span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19.6px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">‘The question, as I present it, already assumes the dynamism of pre-existing environmental tendencies and constraints that act, by encouragement or inhibition, by selection or deselection, by investing or disinvesting, on social formations that are dependent upon its distribution of energy resources. The appearance of all possible randomly generated formations, by definition, is environmentally financed at a niche level (as no unconditioned formation may appear in context) but only a few such formations are promoted to a general, or environmental, scale.</span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19.6px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">‘The successful formation, because it is never not the product of the metabolisation of its capitalisation, must realise an environmentalised principle, or rather, it must realise the conditions of which it is the product. The organised world does not permit success to spontaneous forms but seeks to cultivate, and prizes above all, the representation of spontaneity. That form which represents general relations in its particularity thereby optimises its /contribution/ to the reproduction of its conditions. </span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19.6px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">‘Which brings us to a brief digression on the production and function of representation, precisely because it is a matter that is little considered given its centrality as a regulatory mechanism in the ‘totally administered world’: we might say, as a working approach, that representation is a mechanical process in which an object is seduced by the image of its own abstraction. This working idea inevitably draws us further on - representation is where the generality of the circulating image supplants the fixed particularity of what it represents in the movement of world realisation. “But even in those very moments reserved for living, it is still the spectacle that is to be seen and reproduced, becoming ever more intense. What was represented as genuine life reveals itself simply as more genuinely spectacular life.”</span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19.6px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">‘It has always been a convention of environmental equilibrium that particularised opposing forces operate as systemic allies, and contrariwise, that the function of allies is to establish the path by which the particularity of betrayal returns the whole, through collapses in subjectivity, to status quo - this is the original meaning of revolution, not change but return through the exhaustion of elaborating permutation, that is to say, it is the lesson of Coriolanus. No object sets its own value, no agent speaks his own words. The difference between the systemic function of oppositional forces today and that of previous eras is that the environment in which we now encounter each other operates on an exploitative principle where before it was organised around repression. Systems of exploitation engender a profusion of complimentary formations where systems of repression reproduce exclusive and competitive formations - these are realised historically as the American and Chinese paths in capitalism, or as the representations of the whole as a multiplicity on one side and as a unity on the other; in capital, the alternatives presented are always set up as a crisis of reduction (say, monopoly) or as a crisis of profusion (say, the anarchy of over-supply). </span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 19.6px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">‘Things become interesting where the apparatus of representations proposes, in the manner of the Cretan paradox, that one of the objects it is circulating is not just real but that the object in question’s substance retains an intrinsic, fully disclosed and untrammelled, self-validating value. Where this miracle is proposed, it follows that the affirmative propositions advertising it are necessarily unambiguous, and may be understood as direct expressions, and thus the perfect realisation of the rhetorical identity intention/effect, of what the object really is. For this reason, what I present here is not a report on the Black Lives Matter phenomenon so much as on the room resonance surrounding it - the BLM event above all is an environmental assertion of a product’s intrinsic value, an object that is absolutely what it is. Again, for this reason, I am interested in discerning the register in which the objective conditions for its possibility, the neo-transcendental apparatus, operates and in how the machinery of representation manufactures forms of dissent which, through the assertion of the content of their negations (the political and social equivalent of Watt’s external condenser unit and its later double-acting cylinder adaptations) still serve to strengthen the operations of the manufacturing apparatus.’</span></p>
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<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">SIX SPECULATIVE APPREHENSIONS TO THE QUESTION: WHAT USE WAS BLM AS AN EXIT FROM LOCKDOWN</span></p>
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<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">Speculative Apprehension 1</span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">Was it, as some suggest, and whatever the contingent content, conditioned as a sort of necessity-instigated spectacle of convulsive but ultimately insubstantial protests, a sort of dramatised fireworks display, facilitated and intended as a sort of post-lent, lockdown-exiting, great-resetting, Fat Tuesday festival for eliciting amongst global populations an Olympic Games scale consumption of affirmation filtered through commodity-form solidarity talismans, confessional self-critiques, reparative gestures, logic whorls of intersectionality, empathy rites, identity parades, and virtue crusades, stimulating a return to economic activity amongst populations otherwise drifting away and beyond the conventions of the designated lifeworld?</span></p>
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<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">Speculative Apprehension 2</span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">Was it, as some suggest, to block inevitable post-lockdown unrest from taking a swerve, via hashtag-No-Going-Back, into the materialisation of proletarian demands? ‘The representation of the working class radically opposes itself to the working class.’ And, was it a case of, as is suggested, that by means of accelerating the quantity of branded hashtag-Black-Lives-Matter messages past branded hashtag-Covid-19 messages, the control-net reticulating and metabolising the post-lockdown spike in seething abreactive energies, and upcycling revolt through the apparats of exploitative desublimation, the perfected means by which transference was achieved from the materiality of wages and work hours objectively suggested in the furloughing strategy to the corporate-compatible abstract ideal of anti-racism, which is not so much to be measured at the level of the wage packet but must be deployed in crowds of consumers orchestrated and interpreted by the alliance of technical experts, third estatists and social managers with their graphs, statistics and headline declarations?</span></p>
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<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">Speculative Apprehension 3</span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">Was it, as some suggest, a more or less intentional revivification of the bourgeoisie’s defunct revolutionary reform project by which the totality is ‘critiqued’ in that manner where its territorial character is preserved in its entirety other than in the detail of the progression of a designated interest group’s representatives as they are promoted into its institutions? It seems the ideological space designated for political contradiction retains its utility. Is it important that we note, as some suggest, how the bourgeoisie turns out to be not the employer class but a fragment of the employer class which, as eternal revolutionary subject, must confront the apparatus of exploitation from which it derives its agency?</span></p>
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<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">Speculative Apprehension 4</span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">Was it, as some suggest, either an unexpected spilling over, or else a deliberate export, of the American culture war onto the global stage; a war that stands as proxy for the incompatible operations of rival departmental apparats of the embedded state tied as consigliere into the interests of their corporate ‘allies’?</span></p>
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<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">Speculative Apprehension 5</span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">Was it, as some suggest, the highest stage in capital’s strategy for manufacturing dissent: on one level, an immediate counter to any tendency towards collective bargaining through /radical/ bespoke identity based employment contracts; on another level, inducing an advertising vortex where associated commodities sell an ideologised narrative, and where this narrative also sells the associated commodities?</span></p>
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<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">Speculative Apprehension 6</span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">Was it, as some suggest, the US’s first step back onto the world stage out of Trump-era insularity; a flexing of the muscle of cultural domination by which the representation of Black American revolt, signalling friendship to the world’s oppressed, is used as bait in the trap of colonisation?</span></p>
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<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">Speculative Apprehension 7</span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">Was it, as some suggest, a further development of the neo-</span><span face="Helvetica-Oblique" style="font-size: 17pt; font-style: italic;">rentnerstaat </span><span style="font-size: 17pt;">model whereby chronic systemic and departmentalised crises are manufactured on a ‘not a bug but a feature’ principle and where income streams are secured, on a sort of rent basis, around the institutionalisation of the intractability of such problems - that which first appeared in the guise of a perturbational event becomes expropriated and reproduced in its ‘found’, halted and unsolvable, neotenous even, stage as a pretext for recommencing its processive cycle (a veritable materialised dialectics at a standstill). Thus the various expropriating wars on spectacular enemies, such as pollution, drugs, terrorism, pandemics, fascism, racism are converted via the subscription model into permanentised metabolising relations. There will always be another variant of pseudo-plague, or another climate emergency, for the designated agency to monetise, as there will always be another iteration of ‘white supremacy’ to denounce. And each and every specificity of such crises, always also structured identically as an object of Clausewitzian strategy, will then be secondarily employed as a decoy for, a get out from, whatever binds are being exerted by all the others - anti-racism gets you out of plague saturation; anti-terror gets you out of climate emergency. Then, doesn’t the neo-</span><span face="Helvetica-Oblique" style="font-size: 17pt; font-style: italic;">rentnerstaat </span><span style="font-size: 17pt;">model begin to resemble, and finds its architectural exemplar within, the growing constellations of orbiting space satellites networking world production on a perpetualised subscription basis?</span></p>
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<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">Speculative Apprehension 8</span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">Was it, as some suggest, China’s counter-bankrolling of dissent in America to America’s bankrolling of dissent in Hong Kong? Or to put it another way, was it all about China all along? Was the BLM-COVID alignment a misdirection, not only from the infrastructural roll-out of 5G but from the involvement of Chinese hardware within it? Was the entirety of 2020 just an alibi for an event in an altogether other register? Will the reversal of foreign policy take the form of a political level condemnation of Chinese human rights abuses but allied to economic permission for Chinese investment/control of techno-infrastructure? </span></p>
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<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">TWO SUR-FICTIONALISATIONS</span></p>
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<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">Sur-fictionalisation Approach 1</span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">Or was it, as some suggest, the institutionalisation of a firebreak conspiracy theory, where a unitary-form, and thus state-sanctioned, paranoiac memeplex functions to immunise the transcendental operations of the socius against an otherwise unchecked reticulated profusion in other-form paranoias and hyperstitial conspiracy theories cultivated, at least in part, straight out of the /Spy vs Spy/ disinformation manual? In this way, as some suggest, isn’t the theory of white supremacy, as an underlying organisational principle, eminently deployable as a distinctly US counter to Russian/Chinese troll farm strategies in ideological decomposition? Wouldn’t this then suggest that America has, in adopting an anti-colonial modality in its strategy for colonisation, taken the masochist path by which it must exert control over the crisis of its revolt against itself as the primary mechanism for expanding its circuits of accumulation and thus sublimating its dark joy as an abstracting value?</span></p>
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<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">Sur-fictionalisation Approach 2</span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">Or was the inflationary bubble of the BLM phenomenon, as some suggest, an emergent property of institutional risk management, the cumulative effect of all those re-written licenses, training programmes, bespoke edited contracts, and lofty mission statements designed to evade potential litigation from employees on grounds of racial or gendered discrimination? And wouldn’t such constraints soon be converted into virtuous attributes that may be projected as selling points, operating on the one hand in the form of proschemata-cum-advertising opportunities in the much propagandised war against a spectral menace that may always be identified and armed against but never defeated, and on the other hand, behind the emancipatory discourse, utilised as a realpolitik enactment of the iron law of class domination to remove labour agitators discovered to have shared ‘discriminatory’ social media content? Then, wasn’t it less a case of strategy and more a matter of consequences?</span></p>
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<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">AGREED GROUP CONCLUSION TO THE REPORT</span></p>
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<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">1. It seems unlikely that the inflationary cyber-reticulation of the BLM event was designed and driven by a conspiracy amongst higher forces seeking to achieve predetermined strategic ends, namely economic stimulation following the lockdown downturn in productivity. </span></p>
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<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">2. Ideology is not rhetoric, it does not seek converts nor to persuade the uncommitted of its mystified truth content - ideology’s objective function is to instigate feuds as intra-system attractor basins and heat-sinks that serve to regulate the steady state of the system as a whole. In this sense, the left opposition to left identitarianism, known as ‘class first’ is still realised as ideology, a mere reactive representation deployed as a counter to its rivals - representational invocations of class struggle are not in themselves class struggle. But all this is by the bye, the world has all but passed the age of ideology. For this reason, It is wrong to say the goal of institutionalised anti-racism is to produce racism. That is to say, whilst the decisive precondition for securing capitalisation for anti-racism’s self-reproduction would be an identifiable objective tendency for increasing rates in recorded racism, the system-function of anti-racism is nonetheless located elsewhere and thus inaccessible to the rivalry of ‘class first’ critiques. The use-value of anti-racism’s use-value is not dependent on the question of race at all, and for this reason it is not, as ‘class reductionists’ say, all a matter of ‘divide and rule’ and thus of generating opposing distracting ideologies which function to mystify the mytho-authentic seat of power. On the contrary, the use-value of the use-value of emancipatory movements is realised precisely as, and within, a transfer in the system modes of domination from apparatuses of repression to apparatuses of exploitation. </span></p>
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<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">3. The BLM brand’s extraordinary expansion across the world is probably attributable to the basic stochastic operation of niche opportunism by which the more or less random appearance of an inconsequential object formation is serially promoted according to the levels of efficiency in its reproduction of metabolisable functions feeding through it and back into the energy nets of the host environment - whatever resists least is realised fastest. It is banal and probably tautological to observe that BLM’s success was particularly useful in that particular moment for many contingent reasons and to many correlative interests - even so, this environmental usefulness remains the decisive factor over any advertised intrinsic moral exigency. After all, it was such usefulness, rather than the wholesomeness of the object’s substance, that attracted both the rapidity and volume of investment. To take one example of the object’s system-utility: the aspirational discourse of BLM feeds into the revival of the concept of the deserving poor whereby the necessity of correcting an identifiable system error, racism, by redirecting income flows, may then be deployed, in the generality’s interest, to minimise all other registers of impoverishment and thus rationalise the deselection of every critique that is not anti-racism ( oh, boo-hoo, that’s white people’s problems...). This proprietorial character of anti-racism, who has the right to speak, who has the right to express suffering, and the privatisation of specific modes of affliction-based critiques, extends its system compatibility by feeding into renewed corporate efforts to regulate intellectual property laws within privatised public discourse as channelled by social media under the pretext of combatting ‘hate speech’. A second but related example, utilises the tendency within the general production of representations to sentimentalise abstractions, and fix affects to commodities, these may be employed to satiate the legitimised demand for emancipatory justice as the grounds for scapegoating those individuals transformed into emblems of the worst thing (racism); the virulence of exponentially reticulating attacks on identified individual ‘white supremacists’ is sufficient to drain energy from any resistance to, or indeed consciousness of, the networked abstracting processes by which the exploitative apparatus realises itself as a ‘cancel culture’.</span></p>
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<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">MY RECOMMENDATIONS (AN EXCERPT)</span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">‘Things are not determined by their use, but by how their use is used. That is how the useful object, say an ape becoming a python, is integrated into the environment as a whole. You might think deep down we are genetically driven to reproduce ‘our genes’ but that process is just basic leasehold shelling, real significance is situated in the host environment’s use of a given shell’s branded metabolism within its, the environment’s, own generalising metabolisation of available energy resources. In post-utility societies, significance will always abstract from use in its transfer to the use of use. All outputs at an experiential level, whether favourable or unfavourable, are of equal value. Everything realises, everything is realised. Reform or reaction; progression or regression; collapse or regeneration; all the same, all equally realising of the same inevitable totality. Fascism or anti-fascism, racism or anti-racism, patriarchy or feminism, capitalism or communism, all of them are strategic alternatives in the same base process of energy sequestration. Never before has domination configured itself as anti-power, as the shedding, squandering, misuse of power. Never before has power functioned as the recuperated ineptitude of power, or in the form of a riot against itself. But all of these negations, hitherto indicators of decadence and imminent collapse, are now readily deployable as pillars of the establishment. Ever before and always, what is called the good fight, even where this is understood as the good fight for healthy, naked self-interest, even where the good fight is understood as psychopathic holy war, because fighting is a sign of autonomy and of life, ever before the good fight was always, always, always, in some sense, if only to the protagonist, real, and therefore good. But all that has changed. The good fight today is just a representation of the good fight, it is only algebraically valued, it is expressed by such and such a symbol in its assigned function within the permutational work of the totality. Whatever is called ‘the good fight’ now, call it anti-racism, refers to an identifying label which may be observed and tracked in its movements like a parcel, and in its transformational states, as by Fitbit, as it is digested through the tracts of the realising apparatus. In that sense, the working out of the good as it takes on the form of the good fight, for say ‘social justice’, is only to say something like ‘good is only a moment in evil, and not even an important moment.’ What better way to realise the apparatus of exploitation than through the systemic cultivation of revolt against repression? Men desired change, but are now changed by desire. Men used tools but now machines use men. Men acted but now systems relate men through acts. Men made meanings but relations assign symbols to meanings, and values to symbols, and set symbols against values, and values against meanings, and systems against acts, and machines against tools, and tools against men, and men against their desires.’</span></p>
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<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">NO! MY RECOMMENDATIONS - A MINORITY REPORT (COMPLETE EXTANT)</span></p>
<p style="color: #454545; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 17pt;">‘In opposition to the majority report and its all too political findings, and from which, with this addendum text, I now publicly disassociate myself, although I do not renounce our group collages, I suggest the following alternative as biography and example to others. I am not a good man. I am a tyrant. However, I prefer the company of good men to that of tyrants. I like the Billy Budd in men. I like the natural allies of the world although it is true I am not one of them, being as I am, treacherous. I am not resentful of goodness, I appreciate the finer sensibilities in others, their perception, their emotional range. The good is good, even I recognise that, though I am not of the good. I look to draw into my circle, populating my retinue with, those renaissance men who have the grace, the wit, the physical and mental dexterity, the consistent intelligence, the smiling conversation and simple companionship, the open handedness and pure heartedness, the even gaze, the healthy constancy of face and limb, ah yes, the good looking, morally good men, the natural born embodiments of natural aristocracy; I admire everything about them but most of all their grace, that they may grace me with their nearness. They are my real treasure, my true wealth. Their proximity to my person is a demonstration of my power. If the moths were flames, beings from fire, and the flame a moth, a will from deepest night, and this reversal caused something, a relational figure, that is dark at the centre with flakes of light hurling themselves at it, then that is how it is between us, my entourage and I. I am not resentful of their beauty, but I am still a tyrant. I merely like the company of those who are unlike myself. I don’t want to live in a world that reflects only what I am. I am the neg-narcissus. If I am a monster, I want to associate with those lacking monstrosity. I am always on the look out for an opportunity to enjoy the company of good men, the poets, philosophers and sportsmen, the artists, scientists and soldiers. And, if I may smooth their way, if I may entice them, and so involve them in my world, then so much the better. But even here, I am careful, very careful, not to involve them too deeply. As a personage of note, I am the greatest imaginable ally and friend, but as a vessel of might, I am a volcanic threat to whoever dwells within my shadow. I am wary and I ask them to be wary. Sometimes they mistake me for my friendship. They bring me their ideas and make the case for some good work that they think should be undertaken. Sometimes I agree and this makes them happy: at last, they think, here is the proof that things change, things progress, by alliance, the tyrant’s power mixed into the reformer’s vision. I gladly read their treatises on enlightened despotism. Things cannot go too far of course. I am a conduit of force. I am an ape fork’d in the world of pythons. I will never miss an opportunity to exploit another’s weakness. Sometimes, I will not foresee what is going to happen next, and my allies get coiled into unavoidable complications - at the last, I cannot help them, and I cannot help myself. I am driven to act to save my position, that is the essence of what a tyrant is. Everything else, whatever is caused, whatever the consequence, has rippled out of the event of my self-preservation. But I am also on my guard against my terrible power, I will always hope to head it off, to find another way as if in anticipation of a particular outcome, and so prevent it. An individual does not attack from all sides at once, but I do. I attack from all sides at once. I am the coiling. I am the constrictor. Beware of me, I tell them. I say to them, ‘if not lamb-kitten, then perhaps, ape-python’. I do not think they understand. So, I post sentries at the doors to the rooms where my allies rest, and I command the sentries not to permit my entry - it is an awkward situation, the sentries both can and cannot resist me. I have no active desire to crush good men, but I do crush, and I am indiscriminate. There are too many regrettable and wearying casualties. I have the guards roll sheets of newspaper into loose balls to be strewn around the beds of my sleeping friends, so they might be warned by the sound of papery rustling, and awaken in the moment of my move against them. It is my assertion, it is my declaration, as made from my extraordinary position, that the limit of a repressive tyranny, and you may not understand what I am saying here, is always preferable to the universal reach of emancipation. You may not understand what I am saying here, but emancipation is not always a fortuitous outcome. I will leave you to work out that mystery, but think on this, mighty as I may be, I am but a single fang in the cosmic jaw of the world serpent. </span></p><div><span style="font-size: 17pt;"><br /></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4886674443640643215.post-46573090015488441642019-05-06T06:58:00.000-07:002019-05-07T10:11:47.473-07:00Parable of the tillers of the soil<div style="caret-color: rgb(43, 45, 47); color: #2b2d2f; line-height: inherit; margin-bottom: 24px; text-align: right;">
<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Trodden with the cattle's feet</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">There are villagers, cleaving to the path of Cain, as tillers of the soil, who do not permit themselves to live close by to animals, nor to eat of animal flesh. They prevail over the difficulty of sustenance only accidentally and without grasping the action by which they achieve it. They do not know that they obtain the nutritional matter necessary to their continuation, and which is found only in animal substance, by consuming the unwashed vegetables that they have grown in the fields of their own dung. It is from the dung holding to the vegetables that their bodies take what is needed from animal life without the men knowing of it. And in telling of them, we see that the distant peoples of the distant villages have no need for knowing what we have a need for knowing. And it is also in answer to this need that we may bring before the mind’s eye the image of a worm which is the tiller of the soil in men. The worm begins by entering the most distant end of a man and moves upwards and against the passage by which he is rid of his dung. The worm goes on, and devours the soil of the man, and obtains the matter found only in the substance of animals, and returns it from the place of exile to the place of use, and changes it from motes of dung to motes of food. And in this way, as upon hearing tidings from the abyss, the man lives within the law, and is kept apart from animals.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>Ears/Hear!</i></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4886674443640643215.post-65582528166878374372017-04-20T09:45:00.001-07:002017-04-22T00:31:55.491-07:00Parable on a theory of the emotions<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal; min-height: 12.7px;">
<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 11pt;">A demagogue desires to enrage the mob. Let him.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-size: 11pt;"></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 11pt;">And the mob desires to tear him to shreds. Let it.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 11pt;"> </span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 11pt;">And birds fly up before heavy footsteps.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 11pt;">A scattering of bodies at law's approach.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-size: 11pt;"></span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-size: 11pt;">Let them. Let it. </span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4886674443640643215.post-4121000140151913772017-03-11T01:18:00.005-08:002024-03-23T23:19:06.909-07:00On the baptismal destiny of the unevangelised<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: large;">My name is Heraclitus. I've quit my job at the intellectual property office. I am walking across the town square. I feel good. It's a nice morning. On the other side of the square, I see the new witch outside the witch dwelling. There is as high a turnover in witches as there is in philosophers. They burn out and quit, or burn out and get fired, sometimes they just disappear or die. Any way you look at it, life is precarious when you are caught up in the knots of other people's desires. By way of introducing myself, I do what I always do when there is a new witch in town. I go to the witch's well and I throw myself in. It is a stratagem I stole from Thales. It is the first move into philosophy. After that first step, there remains only one question, might we throw ourselves into the ‘stars’ by looking at the ‘well’? Because the water seeps into the well, because the water is deep in the well, because the water is still in the well, for that reason, it is never the same water in the well. The philosopher gives himself to the witch’s well as a challenge to her witch’s abilities. On this occasion, I throw myself in but I do not hit the arche. I am falling, and still falling. It is not dark, it is not green. I look closely at the stones in the wall of the well as I pass them. It is like the wall of a mountain, or a great fortress. I fall so far that I am no longer moving. I feel the embrace of a clear abyss. The light is icy, the air is sharp. This is not Ephesus. I am falling into the wintry stillness of the far North. I do not feel the urge to breathe, but the air is so cool and beautiful that I want to take it in. I inhale a deep draft of it. The air is not air, it is water. I am choking. I look up to the surface and see the witch's hand, like an anchor on an endless rope, plunging down towards me. It catches hold of me by the collar of my shirt and I feel myself hauled upwards. I am thrown out of the well onto the banks of the world, like a newborn, or a gasping fish.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4886674443640643215.post-19399560327488455652017-03-03T05:57:00.003-08:002022-01-28T07:07:38.440-08:00Bad Parable<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: large;">We sent a second search party after we'd lost contact with the first. When that too disappeared, we sent a third, but only to look for evidence of the second. A fourth was later sent to find the lost third. We sent many search parties, each instructed to look only for news of the one preceding it. We desired to meticulously reconstruct in our understanding the calamity that was befalling our community. Just as the entire body of an object has to pass through a point for it to have truly left that point behind, so we desired that the entire story of our endeavour should return to us, in the order it set out. Didn't the tail that was Telemachus continue the search for the head that was Odysseus, even after he had returned home? Doesn't the ouroboros have to swallow all of its body before it may return again from its own maw? But a</span><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: large;">s time passed, we began to consider whether the searchers' failure may not have been located in the first part of their task. Perhaps some, or indeed all, had made contact with their predecessors and only subsequent to this encounter did they somehow become lost to us. Then we were anxious before a different question: what if the problem was not so much that they did not find but that they had found and then did not report? Even as the numbers of our community dwindled, we resolved to follow after every successive broken link as if it were the first. And by this method, we sought to know everything about ourselves, from the nearest edge to the now distant centre.</span><br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4886674443640643215.post-71963042826373384922017-01-21T10:20:00.003-08:002024-03-03T03:41:44.312-08:00Parable of the quarter pound<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: large;">As a small boy I went to school with cotton wool plugs in my ears, a mother's boy-ridding measure against infection. And in the icy playground I met with other small boys also sporting such white ear tufts. And standing in the fog and damp that seeped into the soles of our shoes we responded from our noses with an oozing, permanent glacier-slow snot that crusted but never dried, a pearly mucus which retained a sort of waxing and waning quality keeping time with our mouth breathing. And it came to pass that the one amongst us with the most purulent of snots, a pouring luxury caramel snot, should also be the most generous and good hearted of our number. In a dilemma of the type that would be repeated in always more subtle forms across the decades of our maturation, we asked ourselves could we, should we, overcome our hesitancy before his prodigious suppurations, and take from his proffered, and ever-open but dirty, crumpled paper bag that contained a precisely measured sweetshop quarter pound? Should we accept just one more of his powdery but mud hard mix of chocolate and strawberry bonbons? He was a boy whom we were ready to play out with, the boy to be encountered outside but not invited in. But in those days we were still prepared, like jays and magpies, to pluck the offered gift and then, in cruel revenge, giving full rein to both our disgust and our weakness, we would harry and laughingly swoop down upon him, pecking at him and mobbing. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4886674443640643215.post-63444086516193838852017-01-03T13:50:00.003-08:002017-03-03T08:02:27.266-08:00A chef<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Sometimes I desire the return to punk rock as it was, as I participated in it. And by that I do not mean 'punk rock' as an episode in pop music. That I can live without. What I am referring to is a small gathering of youngsters sitting on the chilly floor of some provincial town's Bash Street youth club observing a punk rock 'chef' in a red and black jumper who is supposed to be putting on a cookery demonstration but says, 'I can't do this', smashes two eggs on the ground and repeatedly declares, 'it's not happening'. It was one of those things about which peple say 'it just doesn't happen', and it didn't happen anyway, or it was 'not meant to be' but all this doesn't, didn't, and was not meant to be also constitutes an occurrence in its own right. What didn't go ahead as a cookery demonstration was part of what we were about, or more than part of it. Maybe it was all of it. It was the sort of thing that became definitively 'what couldn't be'. For us, it was more the thing than the thing we had attended for in the first place. It was the thing to which everything else attached. A trauma, a misadventure, a failure. The flyers leading up to it. The correspondence. The bus timetables. The vague mutual acknowledgement of certain semi familiar faces. The early arrival of those coming from the mining villages. The introduction by the organisers. The old zines on the papering table. The gaze wandering over surroundings. Where am I? What am I doing here? I now consider that we really were a kind of gathering, a congregation of sorts, of all-sorts, but we also wanted to sit facing in the direction of an identifiably stage shaped space nevermind how rudimentary or improvised. We did not want to engage one another too much, we didn't have a lot to say for ourselves. We were useless and we were produced. We thought it was important to explore the historical dimension of this uselessness, even if we didn't set it out in those terms. Why were we so damaged in relation to those who had gone before? Or rather, why was our existential damage so qualitatively distinct from that of the generations that had gone before us? We wanted to flock together, like little birds at the airport, overcoming territorial instincts in exchange for 24 hour light and an extra degree of warmth. We gathered but we also desired to look in the direction of a comedian, a poet, an agitator. We were an audience, we wanted to react, we didn't want to be the act. Certainly, a desultory air hung over everything we turned up for, but for all that, this failure of the event was still more compelling than any conceivable realised content - if it had gone ahead, like some miracle, then so what? Our defeat, or generalised defeat, defined us. What didn't happen, the concrete non-event, was more 'us' than anything we might have seen through to completion which would only have been let down by the impoverished scale of its success. At the end of her or his non-performance, the chef recognised me as a non-regular and asked if I would like to buy a zine. I didn't but didn't say so. I understood implicitly that within the milieu a transaction was the major indicator of participation, <i>just browsing</i> would signal outgroup proclivities. I asked her or him when the last issue had come out. She or he said 1997. I felt the stirrings of contempt. What interest could an old fanzine about punk nosh, maybe with a title like 'rabid recipes', hold for me? What had this so-called chef been doing in the intervening years when she or he was not serving up subsequent issues? It was only then that I realised that from the standpoint of this, our momentous non-event in the youth club, 1997 was still some time in the future - acid house hadn't happened yet. I took out some money to buy a copy of the fanzine only, like a conjuror holding my hands out (sleeves slipping back), to slowly unfold a red 50 I did not know I had from the crumpled blue five I thought was my only cash. The collective cry resounded, 'chips', and I knew I had just then become the next performance. All of a sudden, these people were expecting me to provide a slap-up feed down the chip shop. I felt an immediate and unfamiliar pang of regret at the prospect of others spending my new found good fortune before I had even adjusted to holding it in my hand. Even if I didn't know how it had got in my pocket, wasn't this money mine? For the moment, I couldn't come up with a believable excuse but it would have been difficult for me to deny in that moment that I didn't want to play my part. Just as much as they wished to be my friends, I now desired to give them the slip. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4886674443640643215.post-32079397385405543382016-10-23T03:57:00.000-07:002016-11-27T03:35:43.452-08:00Oh Calais<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">'If you happen to catch the eye of the deserving poor, as you are passing it by, as it gazes upon you with one of those unforgettable looks that would cause a throne to fall, do not delay in raising your walking cane against it. Lay into it immediately. Ferociously exert the last of your outrage upon it.'</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4886674443640643215.post-8876504212953316012016-08-04T10:09:00.000-07:002017-03-12T05:39:45.018-07:00The man who planted trees incorrectly<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Trees planted by human hand are blown down more often by strong winds than those that grow according to their own method. Humanity clings to the cultural ideal of <i>deep roots, </i>a metaphor that it has derived from its travails with land clearance - and trees <i>would</i> seem to have deep roots if you had to dig them out so as to make way for the plough to come. The deep root as a point of orientation has found analogies throughout human experience, and in critical moments it is readily called upon as a decisive image. However, when it is applied back to its original source, and to the practical task of re-planting the forests, the ideal of the <i>deep root </i>is found to be based on a mistaken perception. Wild trees resist strong winds by shedding stress over a wide surface area: they plant themselves shallowly from where their root system develops outwards rather than downwards. By contrast, plantation trees are grown close together, and their rootstock, although buried deeply, are also narrowly contained - strong winds blow them over like skittles. I sometimes like to picture to myself, as an example of countervailing force, flocks of jays inadvertantly drawing out the thread of oaks through the cold lines of silver birch, as if they are garlanding the end of the ice age. Next!</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Ears/Hear!</span></i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4886674443640643215.post-70080692390676933402016-08-04T10:01:00.001-07:002016-08-04T10:24:59.558-07:00On reading Under the Volcano for the third time (a fiction)<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>The less real, the more true</i> encapsulates fiction's strategic gambit as a flight from systems of information. Upon adopting it as the motto of their approach to the world, fiction's readers assume an advantage of the form that is not completely reducible to artifice, escape or deception (although these are integral to its operation), an advantage which is more suitable to the particularities of their circumstance than theoretical or empirical discursive modalities. The moment a reader makes the perceptual adjustment, 'this is fiction', error's domain is suspended. Nothing is wrong in fiction, all is as it should be. Where information-based discourses function as the necessary repository for human mistakes, and where all literalisms perform their inevitable slippage towards the <i>self evidences </i>of journalism (in which fact checking, balance, counter-hypothesising, rebuttals are deployed as the very weapons of mystification), fiction preserves strategies of the not-real as an antenna, a feeler, for that in the world which otherwise evades perception. Fiction is specifically charged by the reader with the task of finding whatever could not be brought to attention by other means. Here we note how mescal is the final form taken by fate - the protagonist freely chooses it and yet, bound by narrative, he also could not have chosen otherwise. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4886674443640643215.post-64956054808583573732016-06-27T12:30:00.000-07:002016-06-29T08:58:45.356-07:00A story of what is discarded<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>We show greatness, not by being at one extreme, but by touching both extremes at once and occupying all the space in between</i></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Whether they give it any thought or not, every person employed to work as a cleaner quickly learns to make the distinction between two orders of rubbish, the dry and the wet. Taking into consideration the perversity of the human heart, I hesitate to claim that every cleaner, if given the choice, would opt to dispose of dry rubbish over the wet, but emphatically that was my preference. As is the way of things with those who have a limited knowledge of the world, I learnt to carry into other areas of my life this distinction between the states of wetness and dryness as a method of selection, and I applied it wherever I was presented with a situation in which I had to make a decision. In moments where I was confronted with the particularities of an unknown circumstance, I became adept at asking myself the question, what is the dry in this, and what is the wet? Once the initial decision was made, I knew that if I encountered the same object or event again, I was already in possession of a classificatory means for engaging it. Everything then appeared to me as if at the point of its being discarded. And I stood in the world as if before the twin mouths of two refuse chutes. I had the power to consign to oblivion any object I encountered by selecting one or the other of them. Certainly, there were some forms of rubbish, certain ideas perhaps, that were not easily described as either wet or dry. I did not much touble myself with the more difficult items, and I do not care to speculate on what happened to all that junk. Then, when the inevitable happened, and I too became a piece of rubbish, I naturally turned my hard-won method towards identifying the category into which I had been discarded. At the time, I felt the best approach was to ask myself the same basic question which had aided my passage through life: if I was rubbish what type of rubbish was I, dry or wet? Simple. I could not deny the transformation had occurred, there was no way back to what I had been. And I felt the impact of the blow softening whenever I considered that most discarded objects do not get to have their say over what order of abandonment they belonged to. I readily concluded that there was no good reason for refusing to accept I now belonged to the world of the thrown and not that of the thrower. It was my new circumstance. At that level, I resigned myself accordingly but remained actively involved at the level of the subset. What I did not know was whether I had been launched down the dry chute or down the wet chute. As a means of refining my enquiry, I utilised as a secondary set of categories, Bateson's conception of 'collateral energy', by which he classified different responses to external force and thus made distinct the boundary between the energy of a kicked stone and that of a kicked dog. I associated the category of the dry with the category of the stone and (not without humour) the category of the wet with the category of the dog. In the early days of becoming rubbish, it seemed preferable that I should cleave to the order of the dry, and like a stone allow myself to be rolled along at the mercy of external forces. Later, it occurred to me that I might be 'rolled along' like this forever, or at least until I was brought up against an obstacle that would then serve as my final resting place. I soon foresaw that in this position my fate was one of completed abandonment, the indifferent forces of the world would always swirl about but never with sufficient energy to move me on again. For some reason, still unknown to me, I had resisted belonging to the order of the wet and had not been able to issue that kicked dog's yelp. I had not found a way to take charge of the pain. Then, as I settled into my place within the order of the dry, I began to contemplate what might have been if I had chosen to become sticky, if I had made a mess and adhered to the space of my trauma. What if I had invoked the law of surface tension? Perhaps I would not have been so soon forgotten. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4886674443640643215.post-69572055414476274722016-06-26T09:23:00.004-07:002016-06-26T09:35:09.730-07:00Parable on permission<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">A young member of a contemplative community sits with an elder in cautious conversation. He cannot complete the unburdening of his soul but insists the elder recognise the magnitude of his wrongdoing. Fear causes his words to stumble at edge of a full confession. The elder gently places his hand on the other's shoulder. He has learnt to see into the hearts of men and is accepting of what he finds there. The younger brother is meek and known for staying out of the community's occasional controversies. He does not resemble the elder's idea of a great sinner. Long familiarity with youth's eternal weaknesses, and wishing for a way out from the interview, the elder says, let me tell you what to do. You think you have committed an unforgivable act, I understand, but there is only one path out from the burden of guilt. You must forgive yourself the unforgivable, and you must turn your thoughts to higher matters. The younger brother profusely thanks the elder and awkwardly expresses his relief. For a long time now, the community has served as hidden eyrie from which he soars out on a murderous campaign against the local villages. Until the moment of these words of absolution, he has not been able to see a path away from his troubles. He has never wanted to needlessly give himself away but he also cannot live with his guilt. The elder's simple ritual of self-forgiveness now completes the circle of his purpose, and he is released to steal and murder again. With the campaign renewed and redoubled, his many transgressions have no goal but to elicit self-forgiveness which, in turn, as it frees him from remorse, allows him both to act again, and act anew. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4886674443640643215.post-40040592386774340262016-06-26T06:14:00.000-07:002016-06-26T09:58:06.044-07:00Both paths at the same time<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">The joke writer must follow one of two basic structural procedures. The first begins from a fixed punchline. The joke is then constructed backwards from its completion so that the narrative set-up appears to precede rather than follow the pay-off. The joke is engineered to flow along the most efficient path towards its resolution. Succinctness in moving from set-up to release is the key to presenting the punchline in its best aspect. The second structure involves an exploratory procedure which emerges organically from the iteration of the joke's narrative, and which may only complete the release from its lifecycle by encountering an unexpected twist. With the first approach, the audience is invited to laugh in recognition at the all too familiar. With the second, laughter is drawn as if from the audience's own perplexity. It reacts out of tension like it is being presented with an exit that it could not otherwise have imagined. With this distinction in mind, we may reflect that our historical moment seems to be characterised by its insistence on conforming to both joke pathways at the same time. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4886674443640643215.post-45693204512031921132016-06-04T10:13:00.006-07:002020-11-27T09:32:32.598-08:00Fable of the written embarrassed by the writing<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: large;">If I had to describe what I am doing here, I would say I am a <i>littérateur</i> (I do not have another term). I know that I am not, nor will I ever be, a philosopher, theorist or scholar. Nor am I a poet, essayist or novelist. I write but I do not write as these recognisable others do. I do not write in a context of peers, or for some Bubis-like patron. That is to say, I do not write the writing, the writing writes itself. The writing writes me writing it, and I permit it to do so. I have little control as it is written, and less when it is finished - it defies me to erase it. I have an idea at the beginning, and I begin, and then I am muscled aside - for the rest of the process, I stand back and let it bring itself into existence. I have never even considered putting up a struggle against the writing’s sovereignty over itself, or its dominion over my hand. I am in thrall to the writing process, not as it will come to rest in the world (as that disgusts me) but in the hot state of its appearance, its teleprinter-like updating of itself. I have the capacity of suggestibility. I fall into line with the incandescent circuits of its formation. And the outcome of my avidity before writing's own moment is that I am constitutionally unable to follow the conventions of how it should be done. I have never attempted to undertake 'research,' or make a reasoned argument, or tried to situate the text within a wider discourse. I do not read up on a subject before I write on it. </span><div><span style="font-size: large;"><span>At the point of writing I do not anticipate the substance of what I am going to say. The writing commands the content, or it divines it somehow from the world - and from it, I learn my opinions and the coordinates of my 'standpoint.' What it, in the transports of its caprice, decides, I must then defend to the death. I am consumed in its discovery of the unexpected within itself, with the sudden deviation of the path that becomes the unwieldy whole. I do not live to write, the writing lives and it is sufficient that I am present. In </span><i>2666</i><span>, the character who rents a typewriter to the young author Reiter, observes that the writer, under the yoke of writing, is a mere shell, an empty thing. He also thinks that the proliferating moment of writing, what is called 'minor literature' is a sort of fog, a forest, an excrescence. I am aware, or partially aware of these states, of the emptiness and of the instantaneous wall-like forest of minor literature that perpetually attaches to 'masterpieces'. I know my fate as a 'writer' but my fervour still draws me away from good habits, I do not have the power to become (as the owner of the typewriter has become) a happy reader. The readers of writing are happy because they may temporarily share in the enthusiasm of the writing, it's mania, as if it were their own, and then they are free to close the book and forget it. Writers are not like readers, they desire nothing for themselves but only that their texts should be happy. For the sake of my writing's happiness I have fallen into the routine of abandoning myself to intuition and the associative leaps of thought that might occur within the writing process - my fascination is directed towards the internal space of writing, the recording mechanism's recording of itself. But that version is also delusory, or at least overplays its claim. In reality, intuition is nothing but the text's commanding of me to open the window that it may enter my world and bother me forever with the guilt at my involvement in causing it to congeal into an object. A prime example of the wretchedness instigated before the work of writing is the excruciating text </span><i>Democracy</i><span> (AJODA #60, Fall/Winter 2005–06, Vol. 23, No. 2). I am aghast at my part in the appearance of this work of shameless fictionality which is entirely inadequate to its alleged object. It is an abominable work that, as the years pass, has gradually </span><i>sobered up</i><span>, solidifying into the cold and congealed remnant of previous revels. It is a text sealed from all other texts on the subject and refers to no actual instances of what it supposedly repudiates. The calcification of my works puts me in an awkward position. I am confronted with the irrefutable evidence that I have caused to come into existence certain </span><i>cold cuts</i><span> of my psyche that I am then unable to recognise as belonging to myself. I have set in motion that which is not mine but which will nonetheless survive me as a record. I have already indicated that a ritual state of disavowal has become my knee-jerk response to all that I have done, but this is not enough. I am caught in a cycle of making resolutions against previous texts; see my introduction (written in the worst of bad faith) to the reprint of </span><i>Nihilist Communism</i><span> (Ardent Press Second Edition 2009) but then automatically falling back, at the moment of disavowal, into the same pattern of allowing free rein to my demon. Bateson in his </span><i>The Cybernetics of 'Self': A Theory of Alcoholism, </i><span>observes that 'sobriety is a moment in addiction', and that renunciation is a necessary fragment in the pattern of the addict's self-abandonment to the command of the substance, and thus to the effort to attain a metabolised second order stability. This too, seems right - I seek to correct past errors in the text but only repeat them. I bury the past crimes of my writing beneath new writing: corrections, retractions, equivocations. My writing's predicament is starkly presented: there is a radical ontological disjunction between the writing and the written, an incompatibility or divergence that cannot be overcome but only, and momentarily, obliterated from consideration. It is no mystery that readers are happy and writers miserable. If I were to write the text again, on other terms, and write it against what it already was in the world, as I am sorely and perpetually tempted to do, I would only succeed in discovering myself transformed into another Pierre Menard. I am impelled to uncover the writing's reassertion of itself before me. It writes itself again, word for word - only more so, only infinitely richer. This apology too has already expanded and metamorphosed itself into a fiction. I imagine a narrator, somebody else, an appalling character, unthinkable even to Dostoyevsky, worse than a murderer, a type of recanter or apologist consumed by the moment of signing their confession, or refusing to sign, or by expressing with one intent an attitude to signing, revealing its counter, either signing or not signing, that is the stopping, and the setting in motion, and thus the stop that is setting in motion of precisely that which was to be both avoided and also desired above all. I can vividly imagine such a character repeatedly approaching this act of signing their name at the foot of a </span><i>confessional</i><span> text, a trivial confession that they imagine of world significance, and repeatedly retreating from it. At the moment of signing, as if rehearsing a scene in a Rivette movie, the character of the recanter-confessor loses the path only to make the approach again. And so, as I too make my approach, this return, to my futile and nonsensical text, </span><i>Democracy</i><span>, thinking to tear it to shreds, I am surprised and not surprised to find what I take to be rare sprigs of interest. And I am drawn into it again, soon becoming both immersed and persuaded once more by its right to autonomous existence. I am immediately transported back into the process of its </span><i>autopoiesis</i><span>, its self-authoring. Would I go ahead with the destruction of such a text if I could find one good paragraph in it? What about one good sentence? Or, one good phrase? A word? Would I save the text for one rightly placed word? Where I thought to refuse it as a whole, I now find it to be right in itself, right according to its nature as a Lyme's saturated tick is right to its. Can we not think of it as wholesome, if a demonic substance like that </span><i>could</i><span> be thought so? But then, in both the approaching and retreating of the confessing and recanting and that nagging question of its legitimacy in world history, and even as I am rapt by its, the writing's, ubu-like strutting on the stage of itself, I catch a glimpse, like a momentarily surfacing character in Yerofeyev, of my wretched self-awareness. I am jubilantly drunk in and of the demon, consumed by it. I am prevented from achieving self-awareness as such but I am able to sense its place. Before the work of the text, I am not self-aware but am aware of the possibility of self-awareness. I see where it might take its place if it could only override the mania of its own moment. I perceive how self-awareness might regulate the proceedings and implement the architecture by which the profusion is rooted in something external to itself (introducing explanatory footnotes, or references to precedents and authorities). And I also see, from the place of immersion, another place as if from the outside, as an out of body type experience, that this apology for the internal hilarity that the writing has become is still only an elaborate defence mechanism which serves to excuse any further abasement before the words spilling out like a slick across the page. If the text </span><i>Democracy</i><span> is malformed, poorly written, self-indulgent, irrelevant, an affront to sensibility then may I not claim, in its defence, that it also has its own soul? No, it is a soul, and nothing but a soul. It is a pure soul if that is what writing, at the point of writing, is. It is a pure soul if not a good soul if that is what the demonic is. The writing is a soul, then we can agree, but in its transparent desire for dominion over the writer it is also an ape screaming through the canopy of minor literature, hurling its excrement down upon the long suffering hermeneutical subject who, even now, is trying to make sense of it all. At some point, the text inadvertently titled </span><i>Democracy</i><span> (which only appeared in the world in order to take the space of another and more useful text) wrote itself into impertinent existence. It wrote itself as it saw fit, and to hell with its relevance to the matter at hand. To hell, it seems to say, with readers and their happy expectations of what a text on democracy should and shouldn't include. Don't read this, it mocks, it won't help. It won't elucidate your desire to understand what a critique of the democratic process must be. It is a thing of soul but also of an undemocratic nature. It dominates the garden without thriving, a perpetually dying bloom, an intractable root.</span></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com