STIRLING UNIVERSITY, 1994
“Madness is a way of seizing ‘in extremis’ the racinating groundwork of the truth that underlies our more specific realisations of what we are about.”1
Roots. Racinating groundwork and the enterprise of order and decay (disorder) is expressed by the ‘muchroom’, fungal spoor, rhizome or root-spreader. The rhododendron- you burn the plant, but under the soil it is still ready to sprout up again. The roots must be dug out in order to destroy the plant.
Spreading from the roots- not propagation by seed. The age of the clone, the homogenising of the gene pool reflects this distinction. Gone is the noble oak, cut down to make way for the self-duplicating, lego-brick kit-houses. But in the wilderness new changes are occurring, faster than ever. As man excludes nature from his heart and soul, so nature excludes him in a complementary move.
Rhododendron, fern, pine tree and mushroom are all pre-glacial fauna, from the time before time when our oil and coal reserves were being created. And like the dinosaurs, man may become extinct. Virus, computer program, and meme. More root spreaders. Reproduction and replication. The fecund earth. Remember.
To kick off, what happens when the workable conformist meets the pure spontaneous self? Like a viral infection, the whole structure is altered, from the roots, there is no longer any room to manoeuvre, it is an all-encompassing change that mutates the whole system into a new entity, a new netweb of responses and demands (that creates its own aura, its own workable environment. A chaos pattern, which reflects the fractal crack between reality and dream, reality and farce, the percentage of negligence in the world, the statistical error in flux, a fissure of chaos running through the closely organised crystal, netweb of responses and demands, a fissure which will crack the system apart with the correctly struck vibration. It is a linear wave spreading, yet its effects enter into vortical relations which encompass other planes than that from which the change was spawned; off-shoots, from the roots. That is what becomes apparent, what takes our notice, the surface; the waves of cyclic origin of the change is lost, distributed, spent in one motion, whilst on the surface the inexplicable has happened. How did this happen? How was the linearity of cause and effect engulfed? The holographic computer model of four-dimensional consciousness mirrors effects in the human brain, which never stick to their logical occurrences. Mind-body dualism, and developments in quantum physics, have helped to show this.
Human beings whose language changed so that they were no longer answerable to non-human powers would become a new kind of human beings. Language models of meaning are systems of distinction and description, a filtering of multiple layers of consciousness-memory; taken to extremes, the result is a ‘grid-maniac’, a wilful not seeing, stratified layers of experience hardened into an immovable crust, a false-consciousness, ignorance disguised as knowledge in a rigid structure of power relations; blinkeredness, whose motto is divide and conquer, a science which destroys what it is trying to understand by fragmenting it and trying to stick the pieces back together. In the centralised hierarchical command tree, an individual in the system has only one active neighbour, his or her hierarchical superior.
The channels of transmission are pre-established; the arborescent system pre-exists the individual, who is integrated into it at an allotted place. As we shall see later, Niels Bohr observed, this fragmentary approach may work for inorganic things, but misses the point when examining living things completely- LIFE (as essence and process.) How then could this deconstruction work when applied to the classifications of madness, the intricate workings of the human mind? Freud’s techniques attempted a cure by the process of de-individualisation. The madman finds his exclusivity objectified by the trappings of father-like paternalism; his ‘otherness’ becoming an intrinsic quality to be dissected and qualified by the practitioner.
The individual really becomes modern society. He is its element and object. In this dualistic context the disassembly and re-assembly by science of the “In divide-dual” leaves us somewhat raw at the edges (where we were glued back together.) In treating madness as an object, the prison is internalised, and where the madman once launched on voyages across the universe of possibility, now he (or she) finds the stark four walls of rationality. In Foucault’s analysis we see how the language of rationality once communicated with that of non-rationality through the archetypal symbolism of the four humours of the body, the four elemental forces of nature (including ether, some count five.)
Is communication between exclusive powers possible? Even on the everyday level the nonconformist wants to discuss things that have already been fixed in the coming to terms with the defining limits of discourse. One can equivocate idioms, but not ideology. It is the lifeblood of Nationalism.
Wilful not-seeing, the canalisation of the aggressive instinct into social cathexis, divide, conquer, and channel the flows. Internal power relations shape the social hieroglyph.
The arborescent model is the fundamental premise of the logical dialecticians. Divide, branch, root stem; split and diverge. The very paradigm of Plato’s dialectic. The noble, the upright, the crowned Oak King; the book, the scientific method. Royal Science, the Sun King crowned in all his glory. 2
Even authors who stress the role of the acquired and the peripheral at the level of releasing stimuli do not truly overturn the linear arborescent schema, even if they reverse the direction of the arrows (“As Above, So Below” 3.) Matters like reinforced concrete have made it possible for the architectural ensemble to free itself from the arborescent models employing tree-pillars. Binary logic is the spirit of the root-tree. In an hierarchical situation an individual has only one active neighbour, his or her hierarchical superior. The channels of transmission are pre-established. The system pre-exists the individual, who is integrated into it at an allotted place, and who travels up and down its ladders. In the Liberal Society the freedom of speech is highly valued; however, if the language of this speech forms part of a self-justifying whole, criticism is stifled. As with the degree of access to the means of communication. The social institutions embody the search for something eternal in the human. By passing through and becoming part of such an organisation we leave the imprint of our personality mediated by the institutional mechanisms upon the face of the world. Theology and metaphysics can exemplify the temptation to look for an escape from Time, and Chance. The individual is subsumed into a system larger than him or herself, is fuelled by it, works for it, becomes part of a legacy of civilisation and all striving since the Greek dialectic came riding on the Roman war -chariot of formalism. The belief in the system is the same as that of the theologian or metaphysician in that he believes in an order beyond time and change which both determines the point of human existence and established an hierarchy of responsibilities. The individual is subsumed, and yet retains a hardcore of individuality, in its submissive interface with the Hive Vibe, a technological specification in a see of information provides for the urge to transcend the one into the many, to lose oneself in the urge to create, a feeling of empowerment and brotherhood. What could be more “natural”? From a religious point of view, the transcendence mentioned above is inadequate. Not only that, but its antithetical nature lies in the realm of ego-reinforcement which leads to a channelling of the creative energies into a vast machine whose aims are ultimately out of control. The energy released goes up the pyramid to ever higher echelons, is gathered, collected and focussed, and is ultimately released by the Head of State. Conflicting elements of the upper hierarchies channel the energy to their own ends, but it all feeds back into the same territorial system. The results of the actions of a hive member are not his results, and neither is he fully responsible for them. To a cog in the machine, not only is the purpose of the machine itself irrelevant, but also whether it is, in the end, beneficial to humanity or not.
Communication is being able to pick up the fragile eggshell of another’s meaning without breaking it and making a mess. Taking subtle clues from the language of another the subconscious is able to extrapolate their inter-relationship with the whole of existence. In this dynamic interface one is not force-fed with alien ideas but permeates the whole in shifting patterns. Any attempt at stronger definition severs vital life-supporting links and narrows down the time-perspective to near-zero. Thus, the systemisation of the interface destroys all possibility of transcendent interpersonal relations by channelling the energies along carefully designated routes. These unsubtle lines of energy then hurtle along on a fixed deviation and once set in motion are ineluctable. Any contrary motion then comes into immediate and often violent confrontation, even by simply being.
Secondly, men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad amounts itself to a form of madness. According to Pascal 4 , we are allowed out little eccentricities, as long as the joke does not go beyond good taste. Only those with age and status are permitted to be idiosyncratic. (If this is so then it also follows that the most powerful are also the most insane.) The right to idiosyncrasy, as was noted by Kierkegaard:
“The knight of faith […] the only thing which can save him is recourse to the absurd, and this recourse he has through his faith. That is, he clearly recognizes the impossibility, and in the same moment he believes the absurd; for if he imagined he had faith, without at the same time recognizing, with all the passion his soul is capable of, that his love is impossible, he would be merely deceiving himself…” 5
…seems only palatable in the station of their age. Have the aged obtained a wisdom we find inaccessible, turning the supposed Pharmakon 6 into a veritable death-poison? Take Dostoevsky 7 on thought-control: “It is not by confining one’s neighbour that one is assured of one’s own sanity.”
Thirdly, can there be communication between madness and reason? And if so, on what level(s) could this occur? Do the two opposing sides that originate the Moebius strip meet in the extremes of techno-rationality (which strips men of their humanity) and the raver whose very molecules dance to the acid-rhythm whilst imbibing the latest techno-thrash?
The Madman is, like the leper (they took the same line of flight) in that his salvation rests in the communion of shared exclusion. Enclosed by his exclusion he is put in the centre of his otherness.
However, the advent of Freud 8 meant that his otherness was objectified, classified and clarified, the subject finding his alienation dis-alienated in one fell swoop by the analysis of authority. No longer the centre of otherness, but the centre of an appropriated self. Appropriated not for the self, but for others, the needs of the herd. The necessary repetition of learning, of acquiring knowledge, blunts the values that underlie its reason (and its raison d’etre). The things of everyday life are lifted out of the realm of the self-evident. That which is natural must assume the features of the extra-ordinary. That effort which makes live in us that which does not exist on the strength of the absurd 9 . A process of distillation and refinement carries with it the risks of all those whose nourishment comes from a refined, exclusive source; in a one-dimensional process, the open bleeding heart, anaemia of the soul.
In dreams an irrational, pre-rational part of us scrawls over the palimpsest of conscious perception. His wisdom is often far-reaching, this night-bird’s calls echo and rebound, shaping all the sounds of day, filled as it is with the light and relieved of the monotonous night.
Must wisdom really, in the words of Jerome Cardan, “…be torn from the earth like other precious substances…” 10? Are there not other forms of wisdom than those of the wisdom of coal, the wisdom of iron, the wisdom of gems, the wisdom of stone? Uncut, unfound, anathema to the instant packaged decoction? Plucked from the meadow, ephemeral wisdom, or harvested, dried and stored for future use? The sparkling of gold, stolen from the god of thunder and lightning, adorning our cities as they glisten from afar, earthly constellation in imitation glitzy reflection of the cold hard distance of the glorious stars. The new prophet speaks from the heart of the electronic brain drain. Below the car headlights revolve and return through the black void of travel into light, motion in stasis, from stasis in motion, yet the great wheeling heavenly spheres have a profounder gravitation, against which our earthly gyrations betray a fidgety unease.
“Oh learned men, who bear great names, look back on the ancient fathers, learned in the law (a law which was from god, not man). They did not weigh dogmas in shining white books but fed their hearts with natural skill.”11
Madness does not so much deal with truth and the world, as with man and whatever truth about himself he is able to perceive. What brooks it if man should gain the world but lose his soul? Madness gives access to a completely moral universe. Thus, it comes under the philosophical category of morality, and deals with truth and reason of a subtly different kind. Such a night-wisdom will be betrayed by both man and nature: man, because senseless ravings ought to be ignored; nature, because she loves to hide and thrives upon the law of the exceptional.
Madness is the punishment of a useless and disorderly science- aimless tampering, disorderly orderliness- schizmatics. It reflects all the forms, even the most remote, of the human imagination. Madness has merely to carry its illusions to the point of truth in order to reach true resolution. In the houses of correction madness reaches its focal inversion; the inmates fixed and classified according to the conventional wisdom.
On the law, and government, and the natural order of things, one reads that since establishment as people (oneness), you have not yet discovered the secret of forcing all the rich to make all the poor work. This is ignorance of the first principles of the police. Outside the periods of crisis, confinement acquires another meaning. Its repressive function combines with a new use. It is no longer a question of confining those out of work and the poor, but of giving them work to do and thus making them contribute to the wealth of all. The alternation is clear: cheap manpower in periods of full employment and high salaries, periods of unemployment, reabsorption of the idle and social protection against agitation and uprising. What appeared to us today as a certain ethical consciousness of labour (like the Protestant work-ethic that Marx talks about,) in which the difficulties of the economic lost their urgency in favour of an affirmation of Value. Labour was still closely tied in with the fecund earth, man as a transforming agent creating his own naturalised world/environment, prosperity as successful flourishing.
In classical madness is an element which refers elsewhere, to other things: crossing the boundary of bourgeois order of its own accord; alienated outside the sacred limits of its ethic. The underside of this great classical bourgeois dream and preoccupation was that the laws of the state ( = the fixed, the landed, boundary and territory,) should be the same as the laws of the human heart. This is what we mean by naturalisation, in the context of reification, substantiation, colonisation and indoctrination.
Attempts to that end corrupt the ‘natural’ sexual urges and tie man in a non-human teleology of economics (mechanistic or machine-like, not human or animal-like.) The many are sacrificed for the sake of the few. The object of sexual longing is displaced. Conversely, the state sees the nomadic urge as unrequited sexual longing, and the possession fetish as normal. (The fetishized activity, usually in the male totemic sphere, often involves the burning of fossil fuels (destruction of the past, pollution of the atmosphere and all that [destruction of the future] or the consumption of sugar, refined foods and chemicals that have a similar effect on blood/sugar levels (nicotine, alcohol, caffeine etc.) [reduction of wholistic awareness] and centredness of the ego in a linear, one dimensional oneness)).
No religion or cult ever before has tried to sell the people heaven in the present through the mass-consumption of irreplaceable resources and the promotion of greed.
Non-mechanical, or natural, is a rate of growth at which different elements have time to adjust and react beneficially, a type of reaction fundamentally different from any fast-burn process (e.g. refined sugar (human), oil (engine)). Nuclear power is the latest superfast burn; decay of the very packages of probability which shape the world of objects around us; an alter-perspective. Natural as opposed to mechanical processes are life-processes which relate to the movements of the planets and solar bodies and are life-processes which relate to anthropomorphic principles, hence related to the cycles of growth of plants, the movements of the oceans, the weather, the earth’s magnetic field, solar and cosmic rays.
The ozone depletion with its consequential intensificatory effects, is another symptom of an excess of the element of fire in the world.
Cycles and repetition are the life and mind of the soul, the timelessness of eternity, the cosmic vibration of matter.
(The elect, the famous, the artists help, consciously or unconsciously, to perpetuate our culture, invigorate it with creativity, and upholding the complex moral system which only the conditions of our specific and exclusive culture make possible. The ‘artist’ takes what is given and introduces a new element which has an overall transformatory effect on the cultural subset.)
Instead of eating, drinking, and hunter-gathering, and having most of the day off to socialise, enjoy oneself and learn about and love one’s fellow humans, one is expected to conform to the most bizarre regime of orderliness, standing in lines, filling in forms, pushing buttons and tokens about in order for some machine to perform some service for you which it inevitably malfunctions, or supplies you with a simulacrum which leaves a simple need unsatisifed. The establishment of social institutions forces men into its own pattern or internal structures- contracts, laws and regulations etc. and the social dehumanisation of technological mediation replacing or substituting for real human contact. All you learn is that people like inventing machines and systems for other people to follow. We would in no way advocate such prescriptivism in this treatise.
Incompetence and Irrelevance
Useful machines/systems make for useless people. This is the oppression of operational generation of competencies and ever-increasing specialisation 12 The economy can no longer support the person who can do several things well. The government has a vested interest in incompetence. It is the “Keep ‘Em Thick” mentality. The more incompetent the man, the less relevance he has to himself as a human being. Labour-saving devices such as those which are designed to leave more time for “higher pursuits”. The pursuit of acquiring such machines has, however, become a pursuit in itself, when previously it was only a means to one. Such a “pre-shortening” is the rationale of a system which generates its own needs and desires.
However, and this is my point, transitory living is too chaotic, too random to be of any practical use. It makes nonsense out of organic life (“A useless and disorderly science- schizmatics”). One could be knocked over tomorrow- a butterfly in Australia could make the smallest puff of wind which travelled halfway around the globe and by some freak of air currents transforms into a gale-force wind which knocks one flying and splits one’s skull open 13. Such things happen in life, we are all just conditioned to read the Terms & Conditions, like noticing the weather. It helps relieve the tedium of living a tepid life. John Stuart Mill talks about children and responsibility 14 and the extrinsic value of pre-speculative decision making. This forward or growth-oriented thinking (paralleled in meta-economics) aims to recreate the conditions, or create better ones, for its perpetuation, i.e. the child/parent/child cycle. However, as noted above, and by Ghandi, the harmonics of growth must be mutually beneficial for all parties involved.
Let our politicians give up their calculating equations (“x” jobs, “y” amount of money, “z” votes,) based on exclusion and elitism. “…money, though it buys everything else, cannot buy morals and citizens.” 15
The present age and its regime shows its banal, barbaric everyday cynicism through the automisation and atomisation of education, the buying and selling of need-desiring and greed-creation, the creative proclivity of the nihilistic culture.
The externality of unreason- its twofold nature, the confinement within the citadel, the microscopic life of prisons, the city, where bars block your path, walls divide cell from cell, the insects swarm about their hive obeying the orders from above. A human being who didn’t rely on the authority of some higher power, (e.g. God, their boss, “economics”, social media, newspapers), would be a new kind of human. The madman follows the programming of his chaos, once a certain stage has been reached there’s no going back.
Outside reason, the madman is confined by the powers that are generated by the forces of reason. Madness is outlined in silhouette, a profile, a vague threat against normality. Confined in the houses of correction, of the age of reason, those who dare encroach and peer over the socially constructed barriers of conformism are cornered by their own equivocal logic. Not: “If not ‘a’ then ‘b’”, but: “’a’ or ‘b’ or ‘c’ or ‘d’….”. Madness seems to go in and out of fashion. At one time it is displayed as a public outrage, at another, confinement suggests ineluctable shame. For us today the unreasonable is only one of madness’ modes of appearance. Even imaginary illness is classified as illness itself (hypochondria), whereas it may have its roots in the campaign to stop smoking or the aggressive advertising of the New Fresh Clean look, or the “health-food cult”.
Lack of illness becomes an illness in a society where creating useless human beings is the prime motivation for economic development.
There is nothing so irritating to the medical mind as a person with nothing wrong with them. The medical model of well-being is itself subject to manipulation and subversion 16.
And yet there is “…the radical relation of the phenomena of madness to the very possibility of passion.”17 The perpetual leap from nothingness into being, from the logical to the absurd, from the mundane to the infinite is made by passion, not reason; via a middle way which accepts and
acknowledges paradox, and rather than attempting compromise through mediation, satisfies incommensurability. Does man walk by sight alone 18? Incommensurability is the absence of a unit of measure in terms of which two entities can be measured exactly; not comparable as unmeasurable. If one levels down the whole of existence into the idea of state and society, one is left with a vacuum of action, a positive denial, a reduction of the realm of human influence that is at once deified and reduced to zero, a reduction of one’s sense of history into movements of seemingly ineluctable forces. He who would judge himself according to the results would never get beyond the point of beginning. In the system, all emotional energy is directed in reflection, rather than in cathartic conduction, or purge. Which hence establishes an absolute division between work and play.
Yet the latter is the only way to bring about resolution. Attached to the immediate, we explore the universal conclusion. Our passion for life is strong. Rene Descartes wrote his famous work “Discourse On Method” in 1637. From 1628-1649 he lived in the Netherlands. This French philosopher and mathematician viewed nature as a machine, made by God. This machine is governed by mathematical laws. He thought of mind and matter as completely separate. Since the seventeenth century his view that the human body is essentially no different from a machine has dominated science. It is the precursor to the idea that all living creatures are merely machines to be analysed and exploited. (It’s a full-time job running a body, never mind a car!) Rene recognised that although he wasn’t mad the powers of unreason kept a constant watch around his thoughts.
Can one go as far as to say that madness is itself necessary for the very possibility of passion? What are the links in this potentially radical connection? Even before Descartes, passion continued to be the meeting point or ground of body and soul, where the latter’s activity made contact with the former’s passivity. In doubt’s confrontation with its major dangers Descartes realised that he couldn’t be mad, though he was to acknowledge for a long time to come that all the powers of unreason kept watch on his thoughts. The medicine of the humours sees this unity as primarily a reciprocal inter-reaction. Out of this unity, Freud traced a strict line, one passion: sex drive. It was not psychology that was involved in psychoanalysis but an experience of unreason that it has been psychology’s meaning to mask. From this arises notions of libidinal economics, the re-routing and redirection, the licensing of the laws which govern distribution. Orgasm-oriented society establishes the primacy of its relations with phallic-worship. Instituted by the unity of soul and body, madness turned against that unity and once again brought it into question.
One moves from unreason to irrationality, producing the unreal, a derangement of the imaginary. The ancient notion of dream as a transitory function of madness is inverted. The mythical man is turned upside-down, and in a movement or reversal the physical is supposed to bring about the spiritual, not vica-versa. An image is mistaken for reality in the misplaced sexuality of advertising, image is associated in the land of dreams, the pre-rational soul. Our passions for life, and enjoyment is diverted into the image of buying, for example, a certain brand of soap powder. The commodity of (Corporate-Industrial) life is sold to the people with the consent of the State. The State is merely a convenient intermediary, a “hold-off” which prevents the power-groups from reverting to all-out war, this time a war of production/destruction. “Can we sell them bombs?”; “Yes, sure, because if they don’t buy them, we’ll bomb them!” It is no longer the dream which borrows its disturbing power from alienation (thereby showing how limited and fragile reason is,) it is madness which takes its original nature from this dream and reverts in this notion that it is a liberation of the image in the dark night of reality. In this reversal the material and spiritual realms are confused, just as the law of the land reflects the human heart, as the State attempts to interfere with this relation by a process of strict homogenisation and stratification, so the material grows from the spiritual. There is a mutual reaction, but harmonic growth has only one direction: inner to outer. Trying to build paradise from the material is a reversal of its proper conditions for its realisation. Blindness is a distinctive characteristic of madness, blindness to the moving forces in life is to bumble along like clumsy actors at their lines. What have we lost with the advent of modernity but the images of light night, the glory glowing from within, the multitude of spirits?
In the world of dreams, we travelled the universe. It was quite light. Mania and melancholy passed from being merely simple and notational relations into the qualitative realm, into the realm of images; like theoretical particle in quantum physics which interact in Newtonian scenarios for diagrammatical representation, yet constitute a reality at odds with the perceptions which they arose from of a different conceptual order, are in effect the mythological symbols, hieroglyphs, but are known by their EFFECTS on the commonly understood and known Universe, a chain of (problematical) induction (like suppositions about the “spiritual” realms). Without the support of an image, no observation succeeded in transforming the evidence of succession into a symptomatic structure that was both precise and essential. With the birth of a new science such as Foucault describes, the facts must fit the theory. Does the Philosophical problem of induction apply to mental processes? To life? The sceptic about scientific investigations observes how scientists argue for and against various theories according to their own beliefs, rather than the rules of evidence. Data not fitting the collective paradigm is ignored, suppressed, discredited or explained away. A philosophy of continuity, in which everything is an intermediate state between extremes can be expressed thus: “One can measure a circle beginning anywhere.” What of the “Law of the excluded middle”? Cannot one not have a tripartite, or multipartite, logic?
“A terrible state, the punishment of all effeminate souls whom inaction has plunged into a dangerous sensuality, and who, to rid themselves of the labours imposed by nature, have embraced all the phantoms of opinion. Thus, are the rich punished for the deplorable use of their fortunes.” 19
“Through work, man returns to the order of God’s commandments; he submits his liberty to the laws that are those of both reality and morality. Hence mental work is not to be rejected; yet with the absolute rigour, all exercises of the imagination must be excluded as [..] delirious illusions. ” 20
An expression of the Protestant Work-Ethic.
A well loses its value once its source has become tainted. Thus, the stream of the Enlightenment’s fate. Madness became no longer of the order or nature. The objectivity of philosophy and science seem to have led directly to their alienatory effects. Any complementary effect was lost as philosophy was pushed into an ever-smaller niche of investigation and speculation. The authority of the Freudian psychologist comes from three aspects: his general air of savant, or wise-one; the systematic de-humanisation of the patient (child-becoming oedipalized); and the material tools of the trade- a certificate or three, an office, a couch, a desk, a telephone, a secretary. In the valleys of Katmandu many traditional healers are changing, their patients have retained their belief in the spiritual origin of illness and the traditional outlook of collective responsibility for it. Insanity has, of course, long been associated with children. ”21
“If the medical personage could isolate madness, it was not because he knew it, but because he had mastered it. And what would before positivism be an image of objectivity was only the other side of this domination.” 22
CHAPTER TWO- Discipline and “Punish”
The public ritual of torture, the scaffold, guillotine and ‘wheel’ involved a symbolic expulsion, a drawing out of evil in a public execution, and also a pedagogic reminder, an affirmation of the power of the State to punish. Psychological torture creates and affirms the human spiritual entity whilst at the same time denying it and forcing it into a black space, the excluded ‘otherness’ of madness. The comfort of modern prisons is their pain, their humanity their torture: ”We preferred the blows, but the cells suit us better.” (penitential colony in Mettray).
“Confinement is the practice that corresponds most exactly to madness, experienced as unreason, that is the empty negativity of reason; by confinement, madness is acknowledged to be nothing.” 23
“To the Doctor, Freud transferred all the structures […] (of) confinement. He did deliver the patient from the existence of the asylum within which […] (he) had been alienated; but he did not deliver him from what was essential in this existence; he regrouped its powers, extended them to the maximum by uniting them in the Doctor’s hands; he created the psychoanalytical situation where, by an inspired short circuit, alienation becomes disalienating because, in the Doctor, it becomes a subject. […] Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness; it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason.” 24
Foucault speaks of the political anatomy, a direct correspondence to the body of the condemned prisoner. The one pursued by the other’s authentication, are mutually interdependent. A fundamental complementarity of imagery.
“…the ‘body politic’ … a set of material elements and techniques that serve as weapons, relays, communications routes and supports for the power and knowledge relations that invest human bodies and subjugate them by turning them into objects of knowledge.” 25
The focus of ideological control enters the folk-history in such characters as Robin Hood.
In the process of humanisation “the body as the major target of penal repression disappeared” 26. Just as the prison could not exist without the soul, for it is here that the battle for the heart takes place. The reformers inserted the power to punish more deeply within the social body. The object of application of power becomes the play of “…representations and signs circulating discreetly but necessarily and evidently in the minds of all.” 27
“A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains, but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas. […] on the soft fibres of the brain is founded the unshakable base of the soundest empires ”28
“Make gifts of money and you will not long be without chains.” 29 30
“The art of punishment must rest upon a whole technology of representation.” 31
Foucault’s exposition functions by comparison and association, of analogy related to historical succession. By emphasising certain elements there is an implied evolution. The continuity of certain power-systems emerges. Foucault reappropriates history in the name of the oppressed. From this emerges the accusation of his “proto-fascism”. In the words of Claude Lalouche one suggests one oppose tyranny and injustice by actively denying it. Politics has been conceived of as a continuation of the military model as a fundamental means of preventing civil disorder. The link culture-language/speech is further strengthened when one realises that the history of metaphysics, like the relation of dreams to neurosis to psychosis, is constituted by the almost insensible progress of things in their beginnings ” 32 . Representation restores what it takes away, the presence of the represented 33. This is to draw from the disease itself its own remedy in the Platonic tradition of the Pharmacon (history is written by the winners- Greek thought is only mediated to us riding on the Roman war chariot,) in the homeopathic tradition of “like-to-cure-like”, the reciprocal medicine of the humours and remedial witchcraft. Also, interestingly, the process of anamnesis 34: subtract what you don’t need.
“To say that our world is out there, that is it not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes that do not include human mental states. To say that the truth is not “out there” is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth…” 35
When dogma crystallises, the result is alienation (and the nation of aliens, each estranged from one another, cast out of the gates of paradise with bitter resignation.) Union with the gestalt mother, the sea of images that populate the womb-mind of humanity, the shiftless restless ocean of dreams provides the dialectical lever for the formation of individuality. The spark, the essence, where the worlds transcend; the philosopher’s stone has been sought by many. Only the pure of heart can win the day.
Pandora, the woman in the form of a jar, turned into a woman with a jar, repressed by paternalistic society, seductive, beautiful and deceitful, the root of all evil, a jar full of curses. The judges are dancing with the women of loose morals. The shift from intellectual, to intellectual worker, in our so-called “classless” society (a post-Marxian mockery) qualitatively demarcates the technician from the creator. One is bound to the static template 36 of state formality, the other fundamentally transitive. The fusion of mind and labour, the creative intellect, can be symbolised by the marriage of Apollo and Dionysius.
“Alas! What are we doing all through life, both as a necessity and as duty, but unlearning the world’s poetry and obtaining its prose!” 37
Theology and Metaphysics embody the temptation to look for an escape from Time and Chance. Magic and meditation attempt to predict and control Time and Chance. Theology and Metaphysics gives access to an order beyond time, or which organises our notions of time and change, which determines the point of human existence and establishes an hierarchy of responsibilities. Utopian politics dreams of creating an unknown form of society. 38 Humanity’s suffering becomes part of its solidarity. Fascism and humanitarianism (or Anarchy, Or Liberalism- what is it about Fascism and Anarchy in this country that make them both unspeakable, or taboo in polite company?) come full circle when one realises that they are both attempts to win the hearts and minds to causes of comparable virtues that they emphasise and pick out. The Essence of their struggle is to preserve, by painstaking conflict on every infinitesimal value, perpetuate and increase man’s sense of beauty and wonder at the world, a quintessential beauty whose virtues are never blunted by overemphasization, that can only be found, so it seems, at the extremes of living experience when it comes closest to death and horror in violence and tragedy.
Ends-oriented thinking never hits the mark, for we always have control over the means but never the (ultimate) ends of our actions. According to Dewey, Oakeshott and Rawls, the only justification we are going to get for our society is a justification which makes one feature of our culture look good by citing yet another or comparing our culture insidiously with others by reference to our own standards 39 .
The concept of alienation comes under two aspects 1) alienated people protesting in the name of humanity against arbitrary and inhuman social conditions; 2) the poet and revolutionary are protesting in the name of society itself against the aspects of a society that are unfaithful to its own self-image. According to Habermas, Foucault filters out all the aspects under which the eroticisation and internalisation of subjective nature meant a reciprocal increase in freedom and expression.
According to Donald Davidson “rational” means “internally coherent”. However, one may invent any number of internally coherent systems (the parallel universes of philosophers and physicists.)
Relativism is to understand both the old and new vocabularies as expressing some vital human need to express the truth of our changing perceptions about the world. When tact and politeness replace the genuine and free exchange of language-world-percept models, interchangeability and adaptability are sacrificed to the mechanical mediations of exclusive ‘word-nations’.
III Ends
It has been said that it isn’t where you go but how you get there that is important. To exalt ends at the expense of means is to lose sight of two factors: that it is our relations with other people which chiefly determine the extent to which we achieve the great, general ends of human life, such as happiness and self-realisation; and that our methods of seeking what we want have a more vital bearing on the nature of these relations than has the identity of the more limited ends or objectives we set ourselves to achieve.
IV War as Irrational
The disruptiveness of any social conflict is controlled by steady awareness of the limited importance of the issues which have given rise to it. There is a basic tension: standing true to what one believes to be right at the same time as one continues to act in ways that preserve and reflect a consciousness that one’s moral assessment of the situation may be mistaken. Those who wish to get rid of war must either find alternatives fulfilling its functions or must bring about changes which render it unnecessary for these functions to be fulfilled. A moral equivalent of war, an equitable settlement, openness to interpretation and negotiation leads to a reconciliation embodying parity and effectiveness. Human survival must largely depend upon the development of a new will to be reconciled with each other. As men grow strong they tend to rely more and more on armed force.
For example, as Christianity became a dominant religion Christian thought veered from its original pacifism and developed the notion of “a just war”. Armed force depends upon timidity and greed whereas non-violence depends upon responsiveness to friendliness. Failure to oppose that which is unjust does not benefit the dignity of a human being and must undermine one’s self-respect (and also that of the adversary.) It is sometimes necessary to recognise the truth in what the adversary says.
Formerly, the planet was a smooth continuum of language and culture. Dialect gently merged into dialect. One knew where one was. In the absence of the homogenising powers of the car, plane and electric cable, important news carried at the speed of the wind, the postillion, or usually, by the wandering feet and tongues of the merchants, poets and vagabonds. One can represent this type of information technology, the spread of ideas, on a two-dimensional stratum, as ripples on a pond, gradually dissipating and merging with other ripples in interference patterns 40 – the process of history, the results or distortions of time, space and memory. In the present age there are strictly defined boundaries to cultural deviation- a national curriculum, a national identity which is neither brotherhood nor clan. It is bonded by a system of electronic hypostatisation, multi-media techno-ideology. The face of its members everywhere is an investment of the flash of the image of the latest fashion. Everywhere there are “micro-climates” of ideology, electronically united tribes, “scatteredness divided”, where the space in the sphere of human action is defined by the limits of the technopower of integration. The patterns of language, our “gridwork of perceptions and thoughts” which allows us to see and hear (and understand) the world, is distorted by being plugged into the “national memory bank” of archetypal stimuli-response situations. By “replacing” our “eyes”, “ears” and “limbs” with technological surrogates one is already broaching on the “hyperspatial virtuality”. Tardis-like, the space of techno-infogration is “more than a surface but less than a volume”, a three-and-a half dimensional lattice whose any slice or laminar stratum represents a flow of vital, hypostatised information, a cultural “sea” in which to “swim”. The overarching organisational principle is the hierarchical tree-structure which provides the encoding and monitoring. Man, if not most people find their lives mediated by such a structure. A pleasant degree of detachment from time and space, an almost narcotic simulated stimulation, overbearing, irresistible, cloyingly sugary in its appeal to the ego.
The nomadic lifestyle has been incorporated. Man’s desire for ever new horizons translates into the movement within an exclusive socio-political power-structure (“working one’s way up”). Man’s essential inquisitiveness channelled, codified, subsumed by the pyramidal power structures. The greater one’s adherence to the indoctrinating alibi, the further one may progress. This ‘vireal’ journey to ever more detailed and wide ranging role play is a neat inversion of the spiritual travel of the latter realms. The accompanying material increase reinforces the connection between material wealth and spiritual purity, but in this case the rule of god is replaced by the arbitrary hierarchical organising principles, the demands of the system. Travel in the psycho-social cultural medium opens up wider levels of potential interaction. It is seen that one confers benefits not only on oneself but also on others. Travel is relative to your state of mind. The succulent soul surge is fed from an addictive intravenous drip- not the “poison that cures” 41 but the sweet palliative that washes away invincibly to death. An empty dream of a plastic desert, a desolate illusion. Plug into the machine, travel the lattice, it feeds from your soul while you sleep in a cushioned capsule. Contemporaneously the music of the earth has been drowned out, our ears and eyes desensitized by the monotonous drone of the tri[b/vi]al hive beat.
Time is the life blood of the mind. Travel from place to place is travel in time. If you take the long term view of life on earth, it is a question which may be couched in terms of evolution. We in the west have accelerated our time in order to gain advantages over other cultures. We have sold our spiritual selves in order to feed a material kingdom. We have also increased the rate of ‘jolts’ to the nervous system.
Culture agglomerates in sedimentary layers, a striated space of crystalline structure, a geometric cell. The insect mind may yet have its day.
The historical process then lays down fossilised layers. Hence the “archaeology of knowledge”. Usually we see but the surface, synchronicity (“People were always like us, only more stupid”) and complicity of illusion amongst button-pushing, city-dwelling mammals. That our knowledge has shaped the way we are and the type of humans we become, the power exerted by “expert cultures” over their members was understood by Foucault in terms of “bio-power” and its application as “biopolitic”. Information is power. And information technology is the fastest growing weapon in an ideological battle, the battle for the soul of mankind, no less. Borders are inventions designed to keep the mind, not the body, from wandering too far.
Passports and the regime of customs control are rituals and processes designed to reinforce this control. Hence the signs at Glastonbury’s Pilton festival “You are now leaving reality”. Borders are based upon the advantages of size for organisational propensities and economic competition. All the way down the line, intensive exploitation and efficiency. Technical expertise is the resource that will assure the biggest ‘harvest’ of intellectual and theoretical achievers who will boost their cultural image and in turn encourage greater competition and exploitation.
The man who uses violence always tried to justify both it and himself. Engender respect in every human being for every other living thing on the planet, and you have the solution to the violent crimes of rape; for as we disrespect the earth and abuse its life force, so we abuse and disfigure each other. In other words, we cannot undo the primeval relations and instinctual forces that move the human psyche to make way for an ever more technosophic human without an emergent reaction- an allergy.
“When considering the dangers of unaimed tampering in this respect we would do well to consider the knottiness of string, the propensity of suspenders to twist, the elusiveness of soap, the transitory nature of buttons; what has been summed up playfully as ‘the total inane depravity of inanimate things’” 42
“The algebraisation of geometry [which] replaces “visible” geometric figures with purely mental operations 43
…as in Cantor’s transformations”44. The notion of objective substance, as against the subject, tends to disintegrate. The objective world loses its objectionable character. Often a measurable quantity is not a property of a thing, but a property of its relation to other things. A new mode of thinking- the “happenings” in the world of our sense perceptions supported by physical instruments are no longer strictly “determinate” in the old sense of the word. Instead, the full reality contains features which escape our senses (or their supporting instruments) and can only be grasped in the symbolic logic of our thoughts. This is a return to the world shaped by and realised through imagery- an augery. No sharp line can be drawn between an outside world and the self-conscious observer who plays a vital role in the whole structure and cannot be separated from it. A science which progresses by ‘n’ division hopes to make up for what it loses in continuity, movement in flight, by an ever-increasing detail. The computer network is the apotheosis of this- information in motion, the dead bits of the world that had been killed and preserved in shell-like form by science formulated into free-floating bits of information to be manipulated at will, given a theoretical existence in encoded form in the same way that genes hold stored the potential for life and growth. What is cancer but undifferentiated growth? What is AIDS if not the realisation of our tampering with the life-giving processes themselves, subjecting them to dissection, desiccation, desertification and desecration? Deeply rooted destructiveness has taken its toll on the human soul. Visible desolation is the enigmatic sign of an inner decay. As usual, most people are looking in the wrong direction for answers, so tied up with their own personal concerns that they are completely incapable of seeing a fraction of the whole pattern which might lead to a correct solution to the problems facing mankind today.
Neils Bohr has some considerations on the borderline between lifeless matter and living organisms. Bohr assumes that detailed investigations with modern scientific methods would destroy the life of the organism concerned and therefore would be incompatible with the very existence of life. The very fact that an organism is living may well be incompatible with our having a detailed knowledge of its atomic and molecular structure, just as the knowledge of the position of a particle is incompatible with knowledge of its momentum 45. A systematic breakdown produces a statistical error, calculatable upon the assumption of a continuity between one measurable state of reality and another (hypothetical states of in betweenness counted out, of course.)
Science evolved from a practical systematic approach to solving problems in the world. It does not concern itself with quality, with the rights or wrongs, of its discoveries; its only aim is to systematise more and more of reality as thoroughly as possible, and thence to manipulate it as easily as possible, to manipulate it into a more convenient shape in terms of ‘man’. It may be a fallacy to immunise science from qualitative change, and to isolate man from the animals and the rest of nature.
We can divide the world into dynamic quality (chaos) and static patterns (order). The two interact on every level. The static is dead, has no love, demands blind obedience and supresses (dynamic) change. However, it also protects the dynamic process from degeneration.
It is not until a baby is several months old that he will understand enough about that enormously complex correlation of sensations and boundaries and desires called an “object” to reach for one. This object will not be a primary experience. It will be a complex pattern of static values derived from primary experience. Whence the intuitive leap, jumping through the chain of deductions as though it were a single jump. Only when the shift doesn’t work or an “object” turns out to be an illusion is one forced to become aware of the deductive process. That is why we think of subjects and objects as primary.
Static patterns of value become the universe of distinguishable things. Elementary static distinctions such as ‘before’ and ‘after’, ‘like’ and ‘unlike’ split reality and grow into enormously complex patterns of thought and knowledge which are transmitted from generation to generation as the myths, the cultural ‘sea’ in which we float.
One should, moreover, comment not upon the strangeness of hallucinations, the doubtfulness of the validity of religious experiences, but on the system of thought that would try to push on us one view of reality, an exclusion of paranormal phenomenon, banal, machine-like and monotonous.
The interaction between particular and general must be fundamental in linguistic communication. In the last resort, the explanations of mathematics as symbols and operations are specific applications of ordinary language.
Taking for granted the continuous time, motion, cause and effect, dynamic system state determinism ascribes objectivity to the concept of Time.
The physically real is not simply what exists but rather what makes itself observable by reacting in a regular fashion with our senses. Reality is therefor an induction from a probability pattern of observable occurrences, intuiting may tell us when the probabilities are exhausted and likely to throw up a new channel of inductive patterns based upon a transitory Newtonian planetary ‘billiards balls’ paradigm, resemblances which in turn form inductive patterns establishing a new set of probable outcomes based upon the former imagery. (It is only when with the association of the images that an idea penetrates into the workable shift of operational theory.) The external play of the signifier and signified, the tension between fact and value, inner and outer, spirit and matter, gives our only chance of grasping meaning and knowledge as both a practical and theoretical reality. A synthesis of a multiplicity of elements without effacing their heterogeneity or hindering their potential for future (re-) arrangement (to the contrary). The establishment of a smooth and open-ended space. The breaking of constraints and the opening of vistas, arriving from the outside, from the vehicle of madness, disorder, flux, mediated by the eye of science, a science which is anexact yet rigorous. 46 Fluid dynamics, hydraulics, turbulence and vortex; archaeology and stratification into plateaus. Waves of probability replace a rhythmic time/space cycle. It is possible to talk of statistical causality as a fundamental aspect of physical reality. Underlying all science is the fundamental ego/world distinction.
In semiotics the sign is not a word until interpretation has taken place. A word is not a symbol but an experience. The double interpretation of signs as words, then the interpretation of words into meaning of words, is fundamentally wrong. The complex of interdependent philosophical problems regarding language, reality, consciousness and perception processes originate partly in this erroneous double-take of linguistic signs and partly in the lack of knowledge of the fundamental complementarity of communication and comprehension. Human speech is innovative and free from control. The hierartechtic organisation of language precludes concurrence of such usage of ordinary language, and structural linguistic usage.
According to a Judge one must have a fixed place to live in, and a station or cast in life, a fixed identity; a place, a location. Liberty is seen as a disorder by society. Nazi propagandists claimed that Gypsies and Jews, peoples with wandering in their blood, could find no place in a stable Reich.
Psychiatrists, politicians, tyrants are forever assuring us that the wandering life is an aberrant form of behaviour, a form of unrequited sexual longing, a sickness which, in the interests of civilisation must be supressed. Without compulsion no settlement could be founded. The workers would have no superior. The men would not bring in the overflow of wealth to be creamed off.
CHAPTER FIVE: “Architectonic Aphorisms”
Once the basic premises of an ideology are accepted, now observations can be perceived in its imagery and articulated in its vocabulary. Thomas Sasz makes a parallel between the relations of witches to Christianity, mad people to psychiatry. In his critique of mental illness as a myth he makes the distinction between contractual and institutional psychiatry. The belief in mental illness and the social actions to which it leads have the same moral implications and political consequences as had the belief in witchcraft and the social actions to which it led. In the concept of deviancy is embedded the notion of the scapegoat, a victim who bears the sickness and wrongness of society externalised. 47 As with witch trials, any utterance was proof of guilt, as was silence. If a person is accused of mental illness and admits to the signs and symptoms of mental illness it is proven that he is mentally ill; if he denies his illness, it only proves that he is more ill, and lacks insight into his condition. (Insight exists only for one in a privileged position, being able to distinguish between statement and meaning. Blindness can take the form of a recurrently aberrant pattern of interpretation with regard to a single subject or ‘narrative consciousness’) In that we see the world and can meaningfully communicate about it, it is interesting to note that the two-dimensional image is interpreted by the ‘blind spot’ of the optic nerve, and from the caesura is interpreted three-dimensional space. Two dimensional axioms, linear, square, such aphorisms form the derivate image of a one-dimensional interpolation. Formalism, firm apprehensions of the reality of the 3-D world with its inherent visual illusions implies a necessary degree of fluidity.
The synchronism of visual perception which creates an impression of presence is replaced by a succession of discontinuous moments, the creation of a successive temporality.
This, even more than the confession of illness, is thought to justify confinement and treatment. Likewise, the witch was condemned from her own mouth, as part of the psychological process of revealing, and the relieving of the prosecutors’ guilt. Her torture and burning was a merciful act, for if she recanted her soul might be saved. The accusers could do no wrong, the accused no right. In the words of Dr Joseph Ignace Guillotine,
“It is difficult to do some good to men without causing oneself some unpleasantness”
The trial was a farce, as social control, the hand of God, was a power unrestricted by the limiting powers of dialogue.
The conduct of society’s business, as that of its individuals, may be likened to the playing of (a) complex game/(s) 48. The religion, laws and mores of society constitute the rules that people must obey- or else they will be penalised, one way or another. The simpler the ‘games’, and the fewer in number, the easier it is to play them. As individuals find it difficult and taxing to play more than a simple game, or at most a few, at any one time, so societies find it difficult and taxing to support a multiplicity of ‘games’. The essence of invidious totalities and rigid hierarchies of thought. To see the world differently than our peers does threaten us with solitude; and to say that we see it differently threatens us with ostracism.
Since Freud and the liberalisation of madness, normal behaviour was henceforth to be explained by reference to the abnormal. A neglect of the White Witch (or beneficial healer) and an emphasis on the Black Witch, or malevolent character. Freud no longer thought that health and illness, normal and neurotic people, should be strongly distinguished from each other. All sciences, analyses of practices employing the root psycho- (e.g. psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, psychology) have their origins in the historical reversal of the procedures of individualisation. The individual is no doubt the theoretical particle of an ideological society, but he is also a reality fabricated by the specific technologies of Power and their disciplines.
Society’s training must leave off somewhere, resulting in an imperfect slave. Economically, the benefits of any (coercive) training involving the mathematics of profit and loss, gain and expenditure, depend on a small margin of surplus. However, the overall gain of such a surplus, when multiplied by a population, can be quite considerable. Crime can be seen in the context of witchcraft and in the modern context as the rejection of the dominant religious ethic, even if that ethic is a vacuous circularity.
What is called ‘mental illness’ emerges as the name of a product of a particular kind of relationship between oppressor and oppressed. The doctors, who sprang from the popular empiricism known as witchcraft, are far too ready to forget this fact. They are basely ungrateful to the witches who pared their way for them. Satan, it would seem from them, is simply a form of disease! Failing to treat whole persons, whole organisms, leads to imbalance in a society based on exclusion, whence a knowledge based upon exclusion of all criteria which do not fit in with the collective paradigm. This imbalance can lead to suppression and imbalance of ego, alienation which spreads and perpetuates itself via an *elitist* system. Creation of extremes in society, damming and focalising, gathering energy both psychic and material has created intractable tensions and unresolvable paradoxes on every level of existence, hence are widely ignored. We are a peaceable and just society yet we stockpile weapons of poison and destruction, and hold onto our wealth, even though it chokes us, whilst others starve on our doorsteps. The contiguity of prisons within, established by the complementary nuclear blackmail without. These are not accidental outcomes, general conditions of life but symptoms of a deliberately fashioned system.
The effect of the modern psychiatric interpretation of witch-mania is the debasement as insane of millions of innocent women, men and children. It has become too easy to see that the luckless men of the past lived by mistaken, even absurd beliefs; so we may fail in a decent respect for them, and forget that historians of the future will point out that we, too, lived by myths. The persecution of witches and of madmen is an expression of social intolerance and the search for scapegoats. If totality admits toleration, its case is lost. Persecutions in the name of science (scientism) have emulated and even outdone those waged in the name of religion. No one disputes this any longer. The only disagreement which remains is between optimists, who see the scientific witch hunts as largely behind us, in such things as the Naziism and Stalinism, and the pessimists, who see the worst possibilities as still ahead of us, in such things as the progressive dehumanisation of man through the unopposed powers of centrally controlled governments. Ideologies couched in a salvational or therapeutic vocabulary are particularly resistant to criticism. A person who resists the authority of science is labelled ‘insane’.
The non-sense of modern art finds its expression in an inversion of the signposts which normally inhabit our world. In a meta-experiential sense our world is socially engineered to enable us to play the roles we are assigned and assign others to. In a move which parallels the subjectification of madness by the psycho-techniques, the irrational (the “dark night of reason”) finds its daylight expression. A dis-appropriated howl, a symbol that is closer to the charms of an image than to the rigour of an idea. The technicalities established closely reflect the levelling of experience into mere sensation; the emergence of pleasure into pain, the dialectical flow of information in the shaping of the world by economic contingency, phases of alienation and re-appropriation of alienated visions of the self through mass-consumerism 49. The subject is overpowered by structure and movement, by the rhythm of the forms and luminosity of the colours. The human subject is lost from the frame; the mind switches; we are no longer looking at an impression, but have seen through it to the other side, to see the release of the living nightmare of confusion in an ultra-realistic movement. It is as if one is, at one moment, looking through a pane of glass at a garden, the next we focus on the window itself (the aesthetic appeal of the work.) the garden is then, at this moment, a blur of colours. Art does not reproduce the visible; art makes visible. To imagine what has not yet been objectified, what is not yet present, to combine things that have not yet been mutually related, to join them together and to establish an interaction between them; to that which is to be from that which is remembered, to overstep the inadequate here and now.
In a dehumanised metaphorical redescription the lyrical weapon is turned against natural things and damages, even assassinates them. Illusion’s triumph over senses. Estrangement’s stage attempts to realise the rationality of the negative, the repressed, in a process of flux where normal relations are radically juxtaposed. In Breughel and Goya through the mediations of madness things are thrown into sharp juxtaposed contrast and it is the world that remains culpable to the work of art.
However:
“There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored.” 50
The entertainment industries continually and successfully feed the market with rubbish which satisfies the lower instincts suppressed by civilisation. Moreover, if the powerful are able to fix the premises of discourse, to decide what the general public is allowed to see, hear and think about, and to ‘manage’ public opinion by regular propaganda campaigns, the standard view of how the system works is at serious odds with reality. The observed modes of the exercise of State power are based on systematic factors. The public is exposed to powerful and persuasive messages from above and is unable to communicate meaningfully through the media to generate support, compliance and just plain confusion amongst the populace. According to Ben Bagdikian, the institutional bias of the media “… does not only protect the corporate system, it robs the public of a chance to understand the real world.” Additionally, I could not put it better than Noam Chomsky:
“A propaganda model has a certain initially plausible prima facie plausibility on guided free-market assumptions that are not potentially controversial. In essence, it could be observed that the private media are major corporations selling a product (readers and audiences) to other businesses (advertisers) […] Those who do not display the requisite values and perspectives will be regarded as “irresponsible”, “ideological” or otherwise aberrant, and will tend to fall by the wayside.”51
A curious inversion. Furthermore, the investiture of micro-politics in everyday existence is critiqued by Foucault thusly in his classic analysis:
“The body politic is a set of material elements and techniques that serve as weapons relays, communication routes and supports for the power and knowledge relations which invest human bodies and subjugate them by turning them into objects of knowledge” 52
Benjamin Rush thought that the Negros were black because they had a form of leprosy. The leprosy theory of negritude, a forerunner of contemporary psychiatric theories of a wide variety of behaviours, is truly an Orwellian parody of medicine in the service of behavioural control. The Church opposed homosexuality because it satisfied carnal lust and yielded bodily pleasure. To McCarthy 53 the homosexual was equated with the “Totally Bad”, a pure ‘Otherness’, and by extension was practically synonymous with communism. Rush’s modern follower asserts that men whose sexual attitude he disapproves of are ‘ill’; and he uses their illness as a justification for their social control.
“All certain tyrants over souls wish for men they teach is that they should have unsound minds.” 54
Normality, conformity exacts a total mechanics of well-being. An extrinsic requirement exacted as a toll or sacrifice for the ‘blessings’ of the ‘priest’.
“A world shorn of instinct would be a far more deadly and dangerous place than anything the ‘aggression-mongers’ could come up with […] a man might be brain-washed into thinking or saying or doing whatever might be pleasing to the powers-that-be”” 55
Ethnocentrism is a fundamentally central aspect of a society based on exclusion. The bioregional origins of racism relate to Social Darwinist theories. It was suggested that ideological thought is schizophrenic in quality (a surfeit of charging which has seeped along its peripheral surface). The prerogative of over-reification. The race-tribe can only exist at the level of the oppressed race, and in the name of the oppression it resists; there is no race but the inferior.
Thomas Szasz finds in their continuity of the character of the scapegoat an historical essence of mental illness, through the rigour of a formal image. The image is transformed, we think we are somewhere else, but the archaeological method uncovers the same roots which popped up again, rhizome like, even after the felling of the actual tree. The Doctor replaces the Priest, the madman the witch, in the drama of society’s perpetual struggle to destroy precisely those attributes and characteristics which by differentiating men from their fellows, identify persons as individuals, rather than as members of the herd.
“Confinement is the practice which corresponds most exactly to madness experienced as unreason, that is, as the empty negativity of reason; by confinement, madness is recognised to be nothing.” 56
“Crime became less violent long before punishment became less severe…57
The Bourgeouise reserved the right to break their own laws 58.
“The prison is ‘natural’ just as the use of time to measure exchanges is ‘natural’ in our society. “ 59
By sacrificing certain of its members, or casting them into the void, the community seeks to purify itself and expunge those elements that are potentially threatening. In the jungle of institutions and corporations (a human jungle, where only the heartless will survive?) do you know which magic words will open which portals of fame? It is the concern of psychiatry to adjust people to their social environment. If man cannot solve problems by technical means, he resorts to institutional, ceremonial performances. Politicians get left with the problems people cannot sort out by themselves. Debate and legislation, the legacy of a more profound ritual, sacrosanct, the gathering of tribal elders to ask for inspiration from the universal powers, or from the sacred muse logos/nomos/mythos.
Moreover, I do not share the depth of Thomas Szazs’s damning indictment of the psychotherapeutic services. It seems almost like blaming the rat catchers for the rats, whilst the alternatives to the Freudian school of psychoanalysis have burgeoned.
The external play of the signifier and signified, the tension between fact and value, inner and outer, spirit and matter, gives our only chance of grasping meaning and knowledge as both a practical and theoretical reality. What we are really engaged in is synthesis…
“… of a multiplicity of elements without effacing their heterogeneity or hindering their potential for future growth or re-arrangement (to the contrary)…” 60
…establishing a smooth and open-ended space, breaking constraints and opening vistas, arriving from outside. By analysing the paradigm shift which occurs, firstly in a synchronic dialogue between the language of reason and that of unreason, secondly, in a dialectic representational duality originating at the beginning of this century with the birth of the Enlightenment and technological society and the effects of its continued rippling; a geometrical representation of the “fluid dynamics” which trace the history of science back to the nomadic origin in a postulated freedom from ideology; a theory of sedimentation and archaeology of nature and the world in its transference from myth to reality, the dialectic power of ‘the word’ as the force which both creates and destroys worlds; a sedentary analysis of power structures resulting from the formalisation and hypostatisation of sedimentary knowledge (the idea is placed within the coffin of dogma) and the resulting bio-political effects of the ever more pervasive techno-infotainment. A critique of the biological definition of modern being-for-itself (Hegel’s “Dasein”) which rests upon scathing indictments by a number of modern authors, focussing on the concept of dehumanisation in the psychiatric context (which also reflects back upon the investigation into the archaeology of knowledge and its implication on a world-wide scale,) coupled with a general critique of socio-economic modes of viewing the world which the present author considers inadequate to cope with many modern-day problems (such as the alienation of individuals). Comparative methodological expositions into the alternatives to our over-arching chains of command and the mechanistic division of labour (such as organic-interactionist, where all the spheres of being are free to symbiotically interact with each other). An exercise in grids-of-perception, testing the limits of paradigmatic representation as related to scientific objectivity and the “view from nowhere”, a perspective on left/right-handed mind games (the limits of dualism). All this carried through in one smooth movement as we travel from rationality to irrationality (Foucault’s “dark night of reason”) and back again to reach the apotheosis of externality internalised; coming almost full circle again in the guise of the genius.
Foucault provides us with the groundwork for the epistemological investigation of his power/knowledge (a “Marxian-entity”) model. It is this which provides the framework which explores via the other material its potentialities and pitfalls; the structural form on which rests the stretched tarpaulin of the context, forming the body of the rest of the material in a vitally interlinked whole, the empirical evidence for our beliefs. The framework we are exploring and using, upon which the other material gains its perspective and interlinks.
On the principle of like attracts like the creative memory is one of my fundamental tools- analeptical/anamnesis assumption forming criteria. The ability to re-interpret the past (i.e. history) from a different perspective, and hence to visualise a different future. A philosophical project grounded in a conception of psychic development with a trajectory but no final destination computed. My thesis does not follow an hierarchical system of concepts, rather, in the tradition of a critique, examines an interlocking and interdependent array of concepts in their “natural” environment.
Frantz Fanon provides a paradigm on trans-cultural domination and subjection, ideological repression, the power-block on the move, of systematic dehumanisation and stigmatisation, an objectivisation which permits a certain group of people to see another group of people as less than human. That I have chosen to tackle such a sensitive and pertinent issue should not detract from the philosophical mode. The attempt to clarify oppression and stigmatisation in terms of what is truly human rational behaviour and what counts as madness cannot be eschewed. Fanon also provides a conceptual framework which runs parallel to his material description of subjectification in the process of colonisation and decolonisation.
On an epistological level we can see how our minds have been colonised by the dominant mind-set with certain ideas which are ‘naturalised’ which we use daily to perceive and describe the world. Thus, the written word can catalyse a shift in inter-subjective perception. A mental agenda which was so used to having its praises sung by that it took its natural deformities as pleasing features could be criticised but not blamed. Fanon provides a concrete example of ideological distortion in that it is a failure to relate to people in a recognisably human manner, mediated by the power-structure whose wishes are expressed via shock-torture and bludgeons.
Noam Chomsky’s analysis of the manipulation of the media through whose all-seeing eye, it’s network of perception-orientation or myths of an entire nation, how the power-block would like to, or does, see itself, and how others see it; an analysis of the derivation of political power subject to market forces.
Richard Rorty’s conception of the ironic hero introduces the notions of contingency and solidarity. His notion of a final vocabulary is useful in talk about self-esteem and meaning, values and ‘life energy’. The ability to transfer, from one value system to another comes under the heading of passing theories. Thus does travel in an hierarchical system occur.
The one transcends the many, is lost in the need to create, empowered by a feeling of brotherhood and common cause. Karl Marx denies the positive aspect of the system in his rigorous critique of “Capital”, along with his condemnation of religion. In fact, from a religious point of view the type of transcendence through collective technological interface as described within a hierarchy is irrelevant. The energy thus released goes up the pyramid to ever higher echelons and is ultimately employed by the Head of State. The individual is not responsible for the energy he has created by his participation. In a strictly defined and hierarchical system each element is only allowed to interact in predefined ways with its neighbouring cells. The channels of communication are strictly limited and codified.
Translation can be compared to the slow shifting across the globe of a traveller. Languages slide softly into one another like tapestries as one traverses the continent. Conversely, people from opposite ends of one country often have as much difficulty understanding one another as complete foreigners. As one moves in time and space, the language of the milieu alters. So there is no enemy, no foreigner, no them and us, only the slow shifting in the ways which people look at the world and describe it. The establishment of self-totalising systems with strictly defined boundaries is, therefor, a fallacy. The wilful ‘not-seeing’ implied by this can have as its only purpose domination (hierarchical slavery) and its only means, exclusion, conflict and violence (both physical and psychical). 25 The conglomerations which form the major power pyramids are thus limited severely. Their exclusiveness precludes constructive exchange of meaningful ‘world-pictures’ by their elected leaders, hemmed in by ideology, dogma and formality.
False consciousness is related to the repetition of ritual, rite and archetypal act. Timelessness, a sense of wonder and universal consciousness is a feature of the Buddhist religion (and many others).
Nature’s cycles and their time form the boundaries of our horizons. Most religious acts are repetitions of archetypal acts. Schizophrenia complements over-spatialisation with under-temporalisation. Reification of time into a Euclidean perspective of space forces an axiological interpretation onto reality, a “gridmania”. Aphasia and surrealism occur when the over-spatialisation of the senses forces them to revert from pushing time’s fluidity onto a spatially objectified fixity. The result of reversion, if carried to extreme principles, is visual distortion. The gridlines bend and twist to snapping point, forcing one’s nose right up against the ”window pane” of raw sense data, and focussing, as it were, not on the picture but in a cross-eyed manner on the “glass”. In the reversed picture of image and representation modern art finds its apotheosis in lines which emerge from chaos and travel in parallel to infinity. Behind the façade primeval ape-like creatures run across the stage, alive and real.
This entire society seems to be a dismissal of nature- the only cohesion asked of individuals is intended to protect not a natural existence, but the free excursion of sovereignty over and against nature.
Anti-expansionist ‘presentness’ has a past, and facts, a future and theories. In an occultism, a blind past leans on an unanalysed present and a statistically probable future. This militates against any expanded sense of the present, from which the consciousness may bring forward new shapes and forms, just as monosyllabic speech militates against the notion of song.
In the passional realm, or the realm of subjectification,
“…there is no longer a centre of significance connected to expanding circles or an expanding spiral, but a point of subjectification consisting in the departure of a line.” 61
In travelling from a wave to a particle we hit upon the essence of the nature of change: it is change in perspective (paradigm shift) which enables a transcendence of duality.
“The masses certainly do not passively submit to power; nor do they ‘want’ to be repressed… nor are tricked by an ideological lure… Desire is never an undifferentiated instinctual energy, but itself results from a highly developed, engineered set up rich in interactions…” 62
Complementary to this:
“Common sense, the unity of all the faculties at the centre constituted by the cogito, is the state consensus raised to the absolute.” 63
The modern citizen’s environment is the sea of his social substratum, or “slice” of human culture, and the people with whom he interacts on his rounds.
The higher up the institutional hierarchy (and it’s getting harder every day to avoid them) the closer one gets to the dominant reality control principle, the more power and the right to manipulate the conditions of other’s lives ‘below’. In the human jungle nature’s diversity is replaced by a heterogenous variegation of the human species. In the azoic city a jungle of psychic experiences awaits the wily explorer. Social institutions thus have a paramount importance in maintaining this heterogeneity. Social situations and relations are subject to the constant possibility of flux and change. Never before has mankind had the potential for such drastic and wide-ranging social interaction in so many different spheres (not to mention the possibilities for sexual exploration) to meet people of so many different kinds. The larger the city, the more variegated still the lifestyles and cultural backgrounds- Continentals, Expatriates, immigrants, diplomats, soldiers etc. Music, artistic and cultural centres. However, in reality the vast majority of people find themselves leading largely pre-determined lives, even so. Many seem to be drowning in a sea of humanity, a suffrage brought on by sheer excess of numbers, not to mention the ergonomic, health and economic hazards resulting from so many people living in a globally small area. En-mass the movements of its citizens have the appearance of insect-like programming. The effects of homogenisation due to the immediate environmental pressures of over-reification in its objective sense (i.e. the inability of a man pressed in a crowd to do other than the crowd forces him to do), the prevalence of grids, straight lines, glass, tarmac, concrete and brick all encourage a materialistic monological mode of thought. Are these compensated for by the higher attributes of increased artistic and cultural interaction? Environmental factors may offset any potential gains. This prized individuality is easily lost in the “herd”.
The nomadic urge to wander, to seek new horizons, can be seen to be channelled into the realms of “job satisfaction”, “good opportunities” and a pension. Instead of physical travel there is travel up and down the social milieu, in the jungle of socio-intellectual-emotional-subjectification.
Foucault’s model expresses a four-dimensional geometry of the interrelated and complementary effects of the transfer of ideas into signs which may be manipulated by the exercise of power in a normative exercise. The image of the pyramid springs to mind. The essence of rationality is seen in the dialectical tree formation of the splitting and branching at “logic-gates” as discovered by Plato. This replaced the old transference of power through the mythological image externalised and open (or subject) to all. In this ‘ideological’ age the real nature of things is kept carefully hidden. It is not given, but we must accept and submit ‘for our own benefit’. Thus many are able to perpetuate a child-like state. According to the philosophy of micro-politics these command trees are present in everyday situations. This is where I break with Foucault- this further internalisation seems unnecessary and burdensome. If every situation were invested with micro-politics life would rapidly become unlivable. I disprove Foucault’s thesis, and suggest that even if ideological control is so pervasive then it gradually tails off as one gets further from the centre, or if Foucault is correct and the private is the political then it doesn’t matter anyway.
Biospheres interact in mutually beneficial ways synthesising the maximum potential for harmonious growth. Applied to a theory of ideas it will subtract what it does not need whilst encouraging mutually beneficial interactions. Dynamic interactionism establishes the most numerous links between elements of two distinct idea sets. This is more a mnemonics of meditation than an appeal to linear logicalness. Internal coherence is not guaranteed but the high level of interactive exchange makes it likely to achieve cogency before long. Stepping outside the game of pyramid building, refusing to play any game at all, or to play a partial game where there are no winners and no losers, or to play in an arbitrary way, are far from “soft” options, the final aim being of course that one invents one’s own ‘game’ which harmonises with those around one. Hence the need for fixity in space and time; it encourages a total fluidity of personality, able to respond smoothly to a wide perspective of social situations. It hardly encourages the development of extra-sensory perceptions, though in fact, as time goes on (and we’re racing against the clock here) a freeze gradually occurs in these very areas where one was so fluid. This is due to paralogical syntheses and blockage of analeptical and anamnetic precognition. Is there middle ground between determinism and fatalism?
Contradiction is the work of the logos, in rational confrontation between “that-which-is” with “that-which-is-not”. Estrangement rescues the rationality of the negative by speaking of that-which-is-absent. Autonomy comes from empirically conditioned reason; theoretically autonomic reason should be regarded as intuitive intellect. This establishes the practical/cognitive division. Reason can transcend neither sense nor desire. In critical ethics the faculty of reason assumes a symmetry between the theoretical and the practical. The critique of pure reason is intended to fix and to determine the rights of reason in general, according to the principles of its organisational institution. The rational will must follow the universal law, but the paradox remains of how can Reason be a nonempirical faculty of desire as well as the power to overcome and restrain your inclination? Obtaining good will is not as simple as confirming to duty.
“When we spread the wings of thought and speculate on future possibilities, our conventionally minded friends may say we are talking bosh; but if you ask them why they say this they can only reply that past experience of the human race is against you. They do not say this in the matter of flying machines or carriages that go without horses; they say these are scientific discoveries. But when it comes to the possibility of our own souls, they at once set a limit to the expansion of ideas and do not see that the scientific principle of discovery is not confined to laboratory experiments.”64
If the soul is real, and more than just an ontological device, it must have a proof grounded in material conditions such as I have described, however paradoxically it may assume to be.
Society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and oppression. The therapeutic character of philosophy is strongly emphasised, to censure from illusions, deceptions, obscurities, unsolvable riddles, unanswerable questions; from ghosts and spectres. Who is the patient? Apparently, a certain sort of intellectual, whose mind and language do not confirm to the terms of everyday discourse. There is indeed a goodly portion of psychoanalysis in this philosophy- analysis without Freud’s fundamental insight that the patient’s trouble is rooted in a general sickness, which cannot be cured by therapy. Or in a sense, according to Freud the patient’s disease is a protest against the unlivable aspects of the world in which he lives.
In this society the rational, rather than the irrational, becomes the process of mystification, just as ideology becomes to be embodied in the process of production itself. The view that the growth of repression in contemporary society manifests itself in the ideological sphere, first in the ascent of irrational pseudo-philosophies, was refuted by fascism. This regime denied its own “irrational” philosophy by the all-out technical rationalisation of the apparatus. It was the total mobilisation of the material and mental machinery which did the job and installed its mystifying power of humanity. It serves to make individuals incapable of seeing behind the machinery of those who use it, those who profited from it, and those who pay for it.
Today, the mystifying elements are mastered and employed in productive publicity, propaganda and politics. Magic, witchcraft and ecstatic surrender are practised in the daily routine of the home, the shop and the office, and the rational accomplishments obscure the irrationality of the whole. An exploration in hyperspace of the fractal cracks between reasonableness and rationality, sense and sensibility, a comedy of errors, a map which utilises the distortion complex of hypostatised data deployment. The meta-context of a society which becomes the imprint of the desired flows of infotainment.
The traditional dualism in human thought that pitted humanity against animality, society against nature, freedom against necessity, mind against body, and in its most insidious hierarchical form, man against woman is transcended by due recognition of the continuity between the two, but without reductionism or “oneness” that yields, in Hegel’s words, “..a night where all cows are black.. ”65 Nourished by the enormous influence politics and statecraft have on modern thinking, we tend to assume that civil society is more important than domestic society, that ‘affairs of the state’ have primacy over the affairs of the household. The ability to distinguish differentiation from domination, to visualise variation as part of wholeness rather than pyramidally, opens the way to a sensibility that emphasises harmony over antagonism and fosters life-affirming ethics, objectively grounded in fecund nature, that places a premium on variety, uniqueness and the ability of life forms to complement each other in forming richer and ever more creative wholes.
“Every law the people has not ratified in person is null and void- is, in fact, not a law at all. The people of Britain regards itself as free; but it is grossly mistaken: it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing.” 66
It is only fair to ask everyone that he or she derive ideas, not merely collect them; that there be an explanation of origins, meaning, development of ideas, not merely that they be held together with glue and scotch tape.
The conflict in nature between different kinds of organisms has been popularly expressed in phrases like “the struggle for existence” and “the survival of the fittest”. Yet few people realise that mutual cooperation between organisms is just as important, and that the fittest may be the one who helps another to survive. Perhaps man’s modern cravings for “more time” and “more energy” result from his having fallen out with just some of those organisms or groups of organisms which ensured mutual survival. Instead of occupying himself with attempting to form meaningful relations to the rest of reality he is occupied with pointless mechanisms. Biospheres mutually interpenetrate to ensure the maximum potentials for sustainable growth. Nature lives in us ontogenetically as different layers of experience which analytical rationalism often conceals from us. The past is very much alive and well, and is inside of us. Life and mind are expressions of the dynamics of a system’s way of organising itself. God is the concept which expresses the notion of a universal dynamics of self-organisation. This pattern is present in nearly all living organisms: a vast interactive netweb which covers the whole planet. Change, destroy or alter a part of the pattern and you change, alter or damage the whole. Hence the notion of a biosphere which isn’t merely a by-product of organic interaction, but is a functional organ, itself a living entity. Thus the atmosphere of the earth can be seen to have maintained for millenia the conditions suitable for the sustainability of life forms in all their diversity.
A child enters the world without form or concepts. Reality is unquantifiable, indeterminate, in and around the infant. He/she has no ideas of ‘self’ and ‘other’. All sense experiences enter into the mind uncensored. Eventually linguistic barriers form mental barriers and international boundaries.
However, instinct controls the acquisition of language techniques. Language becomes more fully communicable during the later stages of development. Moreover, thought is no longer intuitive- a need is felt for a connection between ideas and logical justification. This is apparently because the child has acquired the capacity for reversibility- for returning to the beginning of performances, both intellectual and practical.
To risk meaning nothing is to start to play, and first to enter into ‘deference’ which prevents any word, any concept, any major communication from coming to summarise and to govern from the theological presence of a centre the movement and textual spacing of differences. In logocentrism the metaphysics of presence form a single system of the whole of philosophy. Grammatology is the science of writing. Meaning forms an extemporal element distinct from time-boundedness. A retrospective/prospective unity of speech and text. Rather than a phenomenology we have phenomena interdependent on previous states. Newton’s laws are profoundly anti-nature in that their divisionism and machinisation break up the synchronicity of being-as-life. Thus are established the two separate realms: machine time and earth time.
History is the succession of one set of inherited, mythological beliefs, replacing another, sometimes violently, sometimes peacefully. In Celtic times this succession was made overt, i.e. in the Battle of the Trees, where opposing sides had to guess the name of each other’s respective god(s) by the solving of a complex riddle; the side whose god was named was vanquished, their mythos absorbed by their opponents. Thus the distinction between fiction and reality is made clear as artificial: they are one and all reflections of mind and experience. The circular nature of reality emphasises the wholeness, the indivisibility of it: mind reflects nature, nature reflects mind. In the infinity of succession and cause and effect, the “minute changes” (or “quanta” of activity) postulated by science and mathematics may come about. But linear succession is a fiction, to better predict and control certain functions and orders of objects in space and time.
In Rousseau’s vocabulary, language is a product of passion and not the expression of a need. Pity is a pure emotion of nature, prior to all kinds of reflection. This contradicts the decay of a rich expression into a mere iteration of wants- the language of an ideal consumer whose only aim is to amass as many goods as possible with the smallest possible vocabulary.
What at first was appearance becomes, in the end, almost invariably, the essence and is effective as such. How foolish it would be to suppose that one only needs to point out this origin and this misty shroud of confusion in order to destroy the world that counts for real, so-called “reality”. We can destroy (the world) only as creators. The origins of Truth may be found in our naturalised, irrefutable and otherwise useful errors. The dominant tendency, to treat as equal what is merely similar- an illogical tendency, for nothing is really equal, is what first created any basis for logic. Thus the basic incommensurability resolves against really providing any satisfactory solutions by this method. Only a truly shining intellect will make anything of this, otherwise it is saying nothing and stays in the murky gloom of error. A thinker in whom the impulse for truth and those life-preserving errors clash for the first fight, after the impulse for truth has proved also a life preserving power, poses here the ultimate question about the conditions of life. To what extent can the Truth endure incorporation?
It is highly probable that this description contains nothing but errors. It would only confuse the issues if I were to try to correct any errors I have made by singling out some particular feature omitted by this analysis. Artists are apt to fall into this trap when they talk about their creations and do not stand far enough back to take a broad look at things. I have been moved solely by the pleasure of trying to understand- perhaps a little fire of enthusiasm (or anger!) also.
CONCLUSION.
The Refusal:
“There are reasons we will no longer accept. An appearance of wisdom which we find horrific. An
offer of compromise and reconciliation we will no longer hear.” (Paris, May 1968)
The world is at war, left wing and right wing, only when both wings fly together will mankind gain the chance to develop its full potential. Freud discovered this nightmare world of the unconscious and how every head is torn in two by the antinomy of sex.
The Acceptance:
It would be strange indeed if, as some philosophies seem to imply, reality were made up of some common stuff called “experience”. It would be as if, upon inspecting my breakfast porridge carefully, I were to find it was in fact made up some homogenised substance. What if all the shapes and colours, textures and materials were all replaced by some “stuff” of reality, unvarying and unchanging, continuous and monotonous sensation? Is this the mental excretion of such philosophy? The search for an “underlying reality”, of laws and principles, may in this light make less sense than a search for an “overlying” one. When there is talk of “sense data” (isn’t this just a device to distance oneself from the everyday world around one of colours, shapes and sounds?) I feel the world closing in around me. I become centred in myself. Colours diminish to dullness, music to mere sounds, people to aimless bodies. Why has my wonderful world of colour and experience been taken away? Where has the life gone? Reductionism of sensation into sense-data ‘reflects’ scientific divisionism. Love of generality smothers individuality. If one approaches reality from the general, towards the specific, the resulting picture will always reflect the mechanistic assumptions you began with.
One moves from the general to the specific, and back again. The process of philosophy creates a framework of thought and meticulous ‘thought-experiments’ which mirror the dialectic process of scientific discovery. This seems purposefully designed to prevent you from seeing the wholeness of the model, or of reality itself, for that matter.
Every thesis has an anti-thesis. Science tests a theory in isolation, in artificial conditions, in order to verify it. Abstracted essences interact in an artificial arena. Does then the sub-culture of the city, paradigm of man’s domination of nature, form an image of the organic world through the harsh piercing gaze of the science god? Society is an institutional hierarchy.
So what is, or should be, the correct mode of enquiry, of searching out the patterns of change, the paths of flow, the feedback, effect and transfer, of the flowering of the dialectical process of knowledge?
Follow the patterns of nature. Use organic systems, organic structures to describe the paths of flow. Abandon rigid, linear structuralism.
Molecular patterns, crystalline structures reflect the death-state (stability/flux dialectic). The death state implies renewal and rebirth. For in our universe nothing stands still, nothing changes. The lattice work is a diamond shining so bright. Atomicity is death in motion, hypostatised destruction/reaction (nuclear fission). Synthesis is growth (tree-paradigm; the tree carries the death pattern, or the other way around, the death pattern carries innumerable trees), patterns fulfil and repeat themselves, structure is balanced by randomness in direction and growth. Swirls, patterns of chaos, smoke drifting in the breeze is anarchy which follows the destructive side of Shive, where all things break up and become one in the void, the slip side of synthesis where we let negativity surface. Three states of reality, the reality of mind transcended of its spatial position, input and output, it’s all the same.
The dogmatic fixation of world-view-percept models enshrines the conditions for perpetual war. This needn’t be. Let the imagination free.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Jenifer Radden – Madness and Reason
Michel Foucault – L’Archaeologie du Savoir -Discipline and Punish
Maurice Blanchtot – L’Entretien Infini
Jacques Derrida – De La Grammatologie
Herbert Marcuse – One Dimensional Man
Noam Chomsky – Manufacturing Consent – The New World Order
Thomas Szasz – Ideology and Insanity
R.D. Laing – The Divided Self
Lee Thayer – The Functions of Incompetance (originally given as a Henry Margenau Lecture at Hartwick College, New York, November 11, 1971) Niels Bohr
Deleuze and Guatarri – Mille Plateaux
Paul de Man – Blindness and Insight
Leon Tolstoy – Government is Violence
Kees Zoeteman – Gaiaosophy
Rudolf Steiner – Occult Science
Tommy Bergstein – Quantum Physics and Ordinary Language
P.D. Ouspensky – Tertium Organum
Aldous Huxley – Science, Liberty & Peace
James Lovelock – Gaia, the Science of Planetary Medicine
Joseph Gabel – La Fausse Conscience: Essai Sur La Reification
Soren Kierkegaard – Fear and Trembling – Repetition
Richard Rorty – Irony, Contingency, Solidarity
Ortega y Gasset – Velaquez, Goya and the Dehumanisation of Art
Timothy Leary – The Politics of Ecstasy
Franz Fanon – The Wretched of the Earth
Willard Van Orman Quine – Ontological Relativity & Other Essays
AFTERWORD.
“{…} The man
Of virtuous soul commands not, not obeys.
Power, like a destroying pestilence,
Pollutes whate’er it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame
A mechanized automaton.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Canto III, from Queen Mab (1813)
Footnotes
1 Michael Foucault, “Madness and Civilisation” back
2 “The despot or “god” wears a solar face that is his entire body, as the body of the signifier. He looked at me queerly, he knitted his brow- what did I do to make him change expression?” Deleuze and Guattari, “Mille Plateus”, Chapter 5, “587 BC – AD 70: On Several Regimes of Signs” (page 128- my parentheses) back
3 “That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above, and that which is Above corresponds to that which is Below, to accomplish the miracle of the One Thing.” – The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, i.e. all things that happened on one level or plane of existence occur on all levels and what happens in the macrocosm can be seen in the microcosm back
4 “The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.” -Blaise Pascale back
5 Soren Kierkegaard “Fear and Trembling- The Sickness Unto Death” (exact page reference unknown) back
6 In Plato’s Phaedrus, the Egyptian god of writing (Thoth) offers King Thamus writing as a “remedy” (“pharmakon”) that can help memory. Thamus refuses the gift on the grounds that it will only create forgetfulness: for him, it is not a remedy for memory itself, but merely a way of reminding. Writing is thus a “poison” (“pharmakon”) that is the cure or remedy for itself, since excess of writing simply generates more things to be remembered in an ever-expanding spiral. back
7 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “A Writers Diary” (trans. Richard Howard via Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation) back
8 Sigmund Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1978) back
9 Soren Kierkegaard (Ibid) back
10 “What is born from the strangest delirium was already hidden, like an inaccessible truth, in the bowels of the earth,” Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation, pg. 23 back
11 Sebastian Brant (humanist and theologian), “Stultifera Navis” (‘the ship of fools’) 1497, Folio. 11 (trans. from Latin)back
12 Consider Douglas Adam’s “Shoe event Horizon” from the fictional novel “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”. The explanation takes place on the second planet in the Frogstar system – Frogstar World B –
where the galactic president has been taken to against his will. The details of his captivity and personality need not detain us; suffice it to say that although the other Frogstar worlds are quite delightful – excellent fishing is to be found on World C, for example – Frogstar World B is a place of dank desolation on which nobody willingly sets foot. Its only inhabitants are large, somewhat human-looking, extremely depressed birds, of whom more later. Its few visitors are limited to those poor souls destined to be fed into the Total Perspective Vortex, to learn their place in the universe, and the Vortex’s disembodied custodian, Gargravarr. It is he who outlines to the galactic president the basis of the Adams theory of economic bubbles by telling him the story of that dismal world: “Many years ago, this was a thriving, happy planet – people, cities, shops, a normal world. Except that on the high streets of these cities there were slightly more shoe shops than one might have thought necessary. And slowly, insidiously, the numbers of these shoe shops were increasing. It’s a well-known economic phenomenon but tragic to see it in operation, for the more shoe shops there were, the more shoes they had to make and the worse and more unwearable they became. And the worse they were to wear, the more people had to buy to keep themselves shod, and the more the shops proliferated until the whole economy of the place passed what I believe is the termed the Shoe Event Horizon, and it became no longer economically possible to build anything other than shoe shops. Result – collapse, ruin and famine. Most of the population died out. Those few who had the right kind of genetic instability mutated into birds – you’ve seen one of them – who cursed their feet, cursed the ground, and vowed that none should walk on it again. Unhappy lot.” back
13 “Chaos Theory is a branch of mathematics focusing on the study of chaos—states of dynamical systems whose apparently-random states of disorder and irregularities are often governed by deterministic laws that are highly sensitive to initial conditions.” Source: Chaos Theory- Definition & Facts, Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2019-11-24. back
14 An attempt at a redefinition of the term “responsibility”: If one’s highest aim is that of ‘Love Thy Neighbour’, if this is prioritised, perhaps with the provision “love thy neighbour as thyself”, or, as Vivekendanda puts it, “Thou, not I, should be the watchword of all sentient being,” (although I am not sure, in philosophical form, if in this context he is alluding to the distinction between “being” and “becoming” i.e. being as true and absolute being, or as existential Marxists would put it, lack of “false consciousness”; or ‘becoming’ as the shedding of the Karmatic burden in service to others (Dharma)), to prevent those of us who once they have a goal in mind become absolutely obsessed with it, fixing their eyes on it, taking steadfastness to extremes, who often trip-up or are mis-directed (or who fall down deep crevices, perhaps to emerge, as maybe part of a series of Manichean trials, tests or quests of dedication.) Yet it does seem to be the case that fanaticism of any sort is usually as harmful to the victim as it is to the perpetrator.
So how to escape from the negativity associated with terms like ‘duty’, ‘obligation’ etc.? when they come fully armed on the end of a truncheon’s swing? When they come in the mouths of mealy polyvocal politicians?
(We are but play-things to these ‘gods’, ‘guinea pigs’ to be tested in experimental mazes!) By perhaps, associating them with love, love as a pure motivating energy, duties and bounds as contingent and convenient links between folk enabling them to act out their highest and noblest wishes. However even if you could persuade one or two people to see their obligations as loving to be fulfilled, how would this affect the world in general?
Would they convince, say, their Bosses, that they were working for love and not money or obligation and that this was the reason they had given away all the company’s profits to the needy? Happy indeed would be that person! However, what if the poor Boss, his business relations ruined, his estate sequestered- reason enough to do away with his poor life! back
15 Jean Jacques Rousseau, “A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences”, (2nd Part, Para. 8) back
16 The triumph of medical Imperialism is complete when the laity regards normal mental and bodily functions as diseases, and harmful intervention, even against the patient’s will, as treatments. back
17 Michel Foucault, “Madness and Civilisation”, Chapter IV ‘Passion and Delirium’, (Para. 2) back
18 2 Corinthians 5:7 “For we walk by faith, not by sight.” back
19 Louis Sebastian Mercier, Tableau de Paris, 1783 back
20 Ibid chapter 9, pp. 235 back
21 “For a long time already, the law has recognised the insane as minors,” M. Foucault, “Madness and Civilisation” back
22 Ibid, Pg. 258 back
23 Ibid, Chapter 4, pp. 109 back
24 Ibid, Chapter 9, pp. 278 back
25 “Discipline and Punish, the Birth of the Prison”, Ch.1 pp.28 back
26 Ibid pp.8 back
27 Ibid, Part 2, Ch. 1, pp. 101 back
28 J.M. Servan Discours sur l’administration de la Justice Criminelle p.35 (1767) back
29 Jean Jacques Rousseau, “The Social Contract”, Chapter 15, pp. 145 back
30 Of the generous donations of the gullible public to the over-exploited so-called “under-developed” “Third World”; perhaps its true function is a palliative, a ‘conscience-easer’. back
31 “Discipline and Punish, the Birth of the Prison”, Part 2, Ch. 2, pp. 104 back
32 Jean Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on Inequality”, pp. 27 back
33 Jacques Derrida, “Of Grammatology”, Notes to pages 279-299, sic (21) back
34 Recollection, especially of a supposed previous existence; A Patient’s account of their medical history. back
35 Richard Rorty, “Irony, Contingency, and Solidarity”, Ch 1, pp. 5. A logocentric teleology? back
36 “Template” as in model, mould into which is poured the substance of human creation back
37 Cardinal Newman, “The Idea of a University Explained” back
38 Such forms dangle at our fingertips every day, we don’t have the impetus or the inspiration to reach for them. We have first to be given the key. We are not wise or strong enough to take the key from the handmaiden of the Gods and storm the gates of Paradise. Few have tried and many of the few have been sacrificed. back
39 c.f. Richard Rorty’s “Irony, Contingency, Solidarity” (p.54) back
40 In mathematics, physics, and art, moiré pattern or moiré fringes are large-scale interference patterns that can be produced when an opaque ruled pattern with transparent gaps is overlaid on another similar pattern. For the moiré interference pattern to appear, the two patterns must not be completely identical, but rather displaced, rotated, or have slightly different pitch. back
41 Pharmakon, in philosophy and critical theory, is a composite of three meanings: remedy, poison, and scapegoat. The first and second senses refer to the everyday meaning of pharmacology (and to its sub-field, toxicology), deriving from the Greek source term φάρμακον (phármakon), denoting any drug, while the third sense refers to the pharmakos ritual of human sacrifice. A further sub-sense of pharmakon as remedy which is of interest to some current authors is given by the Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek–English Lexicon as “a means of producing something”.[2]
In recent philosophical work, the term centers on Jacques Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy”,[3] and the notion that writing is a pharmakon. Whereas a straightforward view on Plato’s treatment of writing (in Phaedrus) suggests that writing is to be rejected as strictly poisonous to the ability to think for oneself in dialogue with others (i.e. to anamnesis), Bernard Stiegler argues that “the hypomnesic (i.e. the “making-technical” of memory) appears as that which constitutes the condition of the anamnesic”[4]—in other words, externalised time-bound communication is necessary for original creative thought, in part because it is the primordial support of culture (Wikipedia) back
42 Dale Aukerman, “Darkening Valley: A Biblical Perspective on Nuclear War” back
43 Hebert Marcuse, “One imensional Man”, p.148 back
44 In mathematics, the Cantor set is a set of points lying on a single line segment that has a number of remarkable and deep properties. It was discovered in 1874 by Henry John Stephen Smith and introduced by German mathematician George Cantor in 1883.[5][6] The Cantor ternary set is created by iteratively deleting the open middle third from a set of line segments. One starts by deleting the open middle third (1/3, 2/3) from the interval [0, 1], leaving two line segments: [0, 1/3] ∪ [2/3, 1]. Next, the open middle third of each of these remaining segments is deleted, leaving four line segments: [0, 1/9] ∪ [2/9, 1/3] ∪ [2/3, 7/9] ∪ [8/9, 1]. This process is continued ad infinitum. The Cantor set is the prototype of a fractal. It is self-similar, because it is equal to two copies of itself, if each copy is shrunk by a factor of 3 and translated. More precisely, the Cantor set is equal to the union of two functions, the left and right self-similarity transformations of itself. back
45 “The Heisenberg uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics is the principle that there is an absolute limit on the combined accuracy of certain pairs of simultaneous, related measurements, especially that of the position and momentum of a particle. Originally posited as a problem of measurement, it was soon refined as an inherent property of the universe. SOURCE: Postscript to Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen (New York : Anchor Books, 2000)” Source of this quotation: Wiktionary back
46 Deleuze and Guattari, “Mille Plateus” (chapter 14- ‘1440: The Smooth and the Striated’) around Pages 486- 488. i.e. The freedom of the imagination to make conceptual links which it finds convenient both as memory aids and for representational clarity back
47 It is interesting at this point to note one of De Montaigne’s observations on the honour of cannibals in battle (from his Essais, Chapter 31) in which they participate solely with respect to the honour to be gained by acts of heroism. This extends to their capture, for they take prisoners with the intention of killing them, yet beforehand they are treated with every human dignity, as worthy guests. Heroism extends beyond the battlefield in retaining dignity to the very end. Hence the words of one about to be put in the pot: “These muscles, this flesh and these veins are yours, poor fools that you are! Can you not see the substance of your ancestors’ limbs still in them? Taste carefully, and you will find the flavour that is in your own flesh.” A witticism which by no means savours of barbarism. back
48 Wittgenstein made it clear that the object of philosophy was to develop the “language game” to the point at which philosophy could stop. back
49 …and mass-communication in the internet age. back
50 Ibid, ‘Conclusion’, pg. 283 end of first paragraph. back
51 “Manufacturing Consent”, p.284, 3rd para; and 4th para (line 6) back
52 “Discipline and Punish”, p. 28 back
53 Former U.S. Senator Alan K. Simpson has written: “The so-called ‘Red Scare’ has been the main focus of most historians of that period of time. A lesser-known element … and one that harmed far more people was the witch-hunt McCarthy and others conducted against homosexuals. (Simpson, Alan K.; McDaniel, Rodger (2013). “Prologue”. Dying for Joe McCarthy’s Sins: The Suicide of Wyoming Senator Lester Hunt. WordsWorth Press.) back
54 Voltaire back
55 Bruce Chatwin, “The Songlines” p. 214 back
56 Ibid, p.116 back
57 Ibid, Discipline and Punish, p.76 back
58 Ibid, (paraphrased), p.87 back
59 Ibid, P.233 (c.f. footnote: “the play between the two ‘natures’ of the prison still continues. In summer 1974 the head of state recalled the ‘principle’ that detention ought to be no more than a ‘deprivation of liberty’ – the pure essence of imprisonment, freed of the reality of prison; and added that the prison could be justified only by its ‘corrective’ or rehabilitating effects. back
60 Deleuze and Guattari, “Mille Plateus”, (Translator’s Foreword, P. xiii) back
61 Deleuze and Guattari, 1988, P.127 (Mille Plateaus) back
62 Ibid, p.237 back
63 Ibid, p.415 back
64 Thomas Troward, “The Word and the Law”, Pg. 43 back
65 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind. Time as the horizon of being, being in and for itself, self understanding, the hypnotising ego-animal. Createdness is an attribute of world and nature, time a fundament of being. Its existential function is to care. On the question of being there is no circular reasoning, but rather a remarkable relatedness backward or forward. In « idle chatter » understanding has been uprooted, is unattached and floating, the pre-requisite for average understanding, obviousness and self-affirmation. Alienation is thence a lack of potentiality of being. back
66 Jean Jacques Rousseau, Chapter XV, Deputies or Representatives, The Social Contract back
AFTERWORD
“Autonomous individuals are capable of volitional and intentional action derived from the manifold transcendental aesthetic in the anheuristic amphiboly of the integrum.”
(Distillation from Immanual Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason”, Chapter 3, Part A – “Transcendental Aesthetic”)
-CJH’02
