Tuesday, December 30, 2014
Prestige
“Anyone in such torment who has the gift of opening his heart, rather than contracting it, accepts the means of salvation in his heart. Someone who in this way penitently open his heart to God in confession lays it open for other men too. In doing so he loses the dignity that goes with his personal prestige and becomes like a child. That means without official position, dignity or disparity from others. A man can bare himself before others only out of a particular kind of love. A love which acknowledges, as it were, that we are all wicked children. We could also say: Hate between men comes from cutting ourselves off from each other. Because we don’t want anyone else to look inside us, since it’s not a pretty sight in there. Of course you must continue to feel ashamed of what’s inside you, but not ashamed of yourself before your fellow-men. No greater torment can be experiences than One human being can experience. For if a man feels lost, that is the ultimate torment.” (Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 46e)
Monday, December 22, 2014
Panty Store
Danny G: So Joey, where do we get all the panties?
Komacho: Joey, you gonna get us some panties man?
Joey: The distance between the adult and child is measured by the state.
Steve G. Ah, Joey, you're crazy man.
Ivan: In the Philippines, my monkey, man, in the Philippines. Shit. Forgot what I was saying.
Komacho: Joey, show us all them panties man. Are they used?
Danny G.: I don't think Joey's got any panties. Show us the panties.
Komacho: Cuz I tell you man [looks around, dazed], if you can get me a big batch of panties, man, I'll fucking sell them for you. All the fucking tourists man. Fucking panties.
Joey: If the child will not heal, he will be mollified by prescription drugs.
Ivan: My monkey, in the Philippines, one day my monkey got in my neighbor's co-co-nut tree...
Boom Boom: You gotta get the pussy, man. Fuck them panties, man! Pussy, man, you go for the pussy!
Steve G.: What's his name? Hey, Boom Boom!
Joey: Boom Boom.
Komacho: Hey, Boonboon, man, you got the panties?
Joey: The child is the enemy of the state.
Komacho: Hey, fellas, I don't know about you, but I've got bad diarrhea man.
Komacho: Joey, you gonna get us some panties man?
Joey: The distance between the adult and child is measured by the state.
Steve G. Ah, Joey, you're crazy man.
Ivan: In the Philippines, my monkey, man, in the Philippines. Shit. Forgot what I was saying.
Komacho: Joey, show us all them panties man. Are they used?
Danny G.: I don't think Joey's got any panties. Show us the panties.
Komacho: Cuz I tell you man [looks around, dazed], if you can get me a big batch of panties, man, I'll fucking sell them for you. All the fucking tourists man. Fucking panties.
Joey: If the child will not heal, he will be mollified by prescription drugs.
Ivan: My monkey, in the Philippines, one day my monkey got in my neighbor's co-co-nut tree...
Boom Boom: You gotta get the pussy, man. Fuck them panties, man! Pussy, man, you go for the pussy!
Steve G.: What's his name? Hey, Boom Boom!
Joey: Boom Boom.
Komacho: Hey, Boonboon, man, you got the panties?
Joey: The child is the enemy of the state.
Komacho: Hey, fellas, I don't know about you, but I've got bad diarrhea man.
Thursday, December 11, 2014
Sympathy and communication
228. Sympathy and communication
How satisfying it is to finally read sympathetic anthropologists, who turn the project of anthropology on its head—the anti-anthropologists. Indeed, how thrilling it is to read Nietzsche’s analysis of the philosophers themselves, their motivations—some have called Nietzsche the anti-philosopher. Indeed, how thrilling to read Sass’s destruction of the psychological concept of schizophrenia! How satisfying to read Wittgenstein’s criticism of On Golden Bough!!!
Yet how can these philosophers be doing anything other than what they are doing—even in their confusion and doubt? How can Wittgenstein put them in the right direction? Isn’t that like putting the schizophrenic in the right direction? Or the Eskimo in the right direction? What was the philosopher’s project? Why was the pursuit of that project meaningful to him?
229. There is a common observation that certain philosophical problems had their beginnings as the product of a scientific attitude, what in Western language could be described as a process of observation or data gathering and statistical interpretation. The argument is that, with the growth in popularity of this vantage point or technique, certain philosophical problems arose, among them ‘mind-body’ problems, problems of defining human consciousness (or articulating what, with respect to consciousness, actually exists with respect to ‘consciousness’), and problems of ‘other minds’ (the challenge of articulating, using a ‘scientific’ manner of thinking and expression, the phenomenon of another human consciousness). It could further be argued that the course to certain ‘philosophical problems’ is somehow inherent in the nature of ‘philosophy’ itself—philosophy’s being a Western phenomena in the history of humanity, a project rooted deeply in language: deeply imbedded in a history of legibility, standardization, and systemization of human experience and expression.
At first it could be tempting to consider the prospect of an anthropological approach to certain of these philosophical problems. Why not get on the ground, get back to real observations, trace back the path to where human beings began to circumscribe and delimit human experience into a powerful matrix—a system, tool, or prison—that is commonly referred to as ‘language.’ The problem is that the anthropologist will never be able to wash himself of his original sin, for his approach to his project is shaped, guided, and described by language, and his account of his project will similarly operate under its conduit. He will realize that the very project of anthropology—observation, description, prediction, etiology—all emanate from the very material of the language that he uses. His only escape from this matrix of language would be to abandon the very project of expression using language. Abandon communication. Eschewing contact with language, which would mean avoiding all contact with any living being who either speaks or writes a written language, he could then attempt to carry on some form of activity. What would he get back to? What insight might be the result of his new course? Outside of language, outside of his communication—his speaking, his writing, the books and articles and journals of his past—what would be expressible to those who remain in a matrix of language, a matrix that our anthropologist has presumably escaped?
It is an important, practical question, because, as I write, there is a man, who has gone off in the wilderness, who has realized his project of anthropology was problem-filled. In his recently discovered notes, I have found the following:
1. First, the problem with my project is that it is a project. I don’t even know or care anymore about the definition of a project or what a project could possibly be. It’s some scary fucking ritual. Not a ritual I’m dancing anymore. Fuck it. Fuck the funding. Fuck every motherfucker who ever wrote a fucking book. Fuck every class I took. Fuck that dissertation. What waste of time. I could have lived in those years. What a bad charade my life has been.
2. The second problem is that all this shit is pre-literate experience. How the fuck can I go about writing about pre-literate experience? Does anyone put a big fucking warning label on this shit—“Waste of time. Not gonna go anywhere. Can only make you miserable and confused.” What sick curiosity do we have that makes us want to go look at all the last living relics of all the shit we wiped out? What do we get from it? Entertainment? Wisdom? Are we just apologists? It’s like we’ve sent radiation that killed everyone. We make visits to the hospital bedsides to wipe the brows of people we have ourselves murdered. Some Western asshole is going o find my work ‘interesting,’ tantalizing,’ fascinating,’ or ‘enjoyable?’ Is that what this is all about? Some asshole thinks the whole fucking thing is interesting??
3. I get lost and hope no one ever finds me.
Is someone going to get him? Can he really go up and escape like that? What sort of interesting or fascinating work would he have written had he chosen to continue with his project?
Sunday, December 7, 2014
Schreber
227. First thoughts on Schreber
It is strange to travel from a no-nonsense world in a sense very different from the idea of ‘non-nonsense’ back in a far more populated and ‘modern’ town. The 'sensible' concerns in [this town] seem nothing more than rabid, phantom-like cancers of the spirit. Once a man has experienced the possibilities of great freedom in the wilderness of Alaska (or the wilderness of Argentina or Chile), he cannot but dive into what many would call a world of fantasy—but here is the rub for those of this developed, modern matrix: the world of fantasy your wild man seeks as his escape, is not a world of delusion, but a real place, a real environment in which he once lived. His insanity, as you call it, his delusion, his paranoia, is that his earth, and the men and women who once populated it, have died, have all died in the worst of holocausts. He screams back to a world that is alive and well, yet his screams fall to the ears of prisoners, of a type of man beaten, abused, manufactured, neutered, castrated of spirit, heart, soul, feeling, freedom, love, village, and autonomy. These western cities are a nightmare for such a man—yet when will the sun rise to make this bad vision end? This is all he is asking--but the walking dead can do nothing but ascribe insanity to such a man.
The shock of his transfer to the environment is so intense, bewildering, disorienting, and confusing—he sees this 'very normal,' operating reality as his worst nightmare, as the apocalypse of man.
Everything worked out fine in his previous life. He walked out to the lake with K and the family and they threw stones. They drank beer and they shot guns in the woods. They chopped wood and fried fish late into the nights and slept until noon. K would speak for hours about land, about how to build a home and stay warm, about working hard and getting a man’s roots planted. He knew these things because he had done it himself, was living in the very home he built, had lived on his land for 19 years.“These hills,” he told me, “are my last but they are mine. They will be were I am buried.”
Yet I read about the “delusions” that Schreber had and that are apparently characteristic of schizophrenia and it is clear to me that these so-called mental illnesses are products of the human spirit’s resistance against high-modernist schema—we lose the exploration, we lose our freedom, we lose the thrill of escape and wander, we lose our experience of the lake, the stars, the sky, the snow, the great mystery of our ascending and descending the mountains, of our deep and ecstatic love of others, of the real risk of our death or what we might better describe as our becoming one with a great and vast and eternal nature, a great and final release that may well be just the beginning. Indeed, our primitive past was a utopia, plain and simple, but what cruelty have been these modern times: for not only do these times seek to annihilate a past which was man’s great freedom and paradise, but it has attempted to cauterize man’s very spiritual tie to this past in such a way that a man must have a complete rebirth to enter into, once again, such a mystic, such a limitless, such a free world.
No-nonsense, back in the woods, in Alaska, meant none of the bullshit of the city and any of its mental illness. Yet everything we do here outside of your matrix, our values, our lives, our pursuits, our desire for privacy and seclusion, our desire to be left alone from the machine that eats both the wilderness and the free spirit of man—everything we do away from you people and your nightmare of a civilization has no value because it has no place in your scheme of legibility, coersion, and control, because it is a sphere of freedom that will never willingly be relinquished, because men of death and darkness burn in the presence of light, burn in the energy of free men, are deafened by the laughter of wind.
It is strange to travel from a no-nonsense world in a sense very different from the idea of ‘non-nonsense’ back in a far more populated and ‘modern’ town. The 'sensible' concerns in [this town] seem nothing more than rabid, phantom-like cancers of the spirit. Once a man has experienced the possibilities of great freedom in the wilderness of Alaska (or the wilderness of Argentina or Chile), he cannot but dive into what many would call a world of fantasy—but here is the rub for those of this developed, modern matrix: the world of fantasy your wild man seeks as his escape, is not a world of delusion, but a real place, a real environment in which he once lived. His insanity, as you call it, his delusion, his paranoia, is that his earth, and the men and women who once populated it, have died, have all died in the worst of holocausts. He screams back to a world that is alive and well, yet his screams fall to the ears of prisoners, of a type of man beaten, abused, manufactured, neutered, castrated of spirit, heart, soul, feeling, freedom, love, village, and autonomy. These western cities are a nightmare for such a man—yet when will the sun rise to make this bad vision end? This is all he is asking--but the walking dead can do nothing but ascribe insanity to such a man.
The shock of his transfer to the environment is so intense, bewildering, disorienting, and confusing—he sees this 'very normal,' operating reality as his worst nightmare, as the apocalypse of man.
Everything worked out fine in his previous life. He walked out to the lake with K and the family and they threw stones. They drank beer and they shot guns in the woods. They chopped wood and fried fish late into the nights and slept until noon. K would speak for hours about land, about how to build a home and stay warm, about working hard and getting a man’s roots planted. He knew these things because he had done it himself, was living in the very home he built, had lived on his land for 19 years.“These hills,” he told me, “are my last but they are mine. They will be were I am buried.”
Yet I read about the “delusions” that Schreber had and that are apparently characteristic of schizophrenia and it is clear to me that these so-called mental illnesses are products of the human spirit’s resistance against high-modernist schema—we lose the exploration, we lose our freedom, we lose the thrill of escape and wander, we lose our experience of the lake, the stars, the sky, the snow, the great mystery of our ascending and descending the mountains, of our deep and ecstatic love of others, of the real risk of our death or what we might better describe as our becoming one with a great and vast and eternal nature, a great and final release that may well be just the beginning. Indeed, our primitive past was a utopia, plain and simple, but what cruelty have been these modern times: for not only do these times seek to annihilate a past which was man’s great freedom and paradise, but it has attempted to cauterize man’s very spiritual tie to this past in such a way that a man must have a complete rebirth to enter into, once again, such a mystic, such a limitless, such a free world.
No-nonsense, back in the woods, in Alaska, meant none of the bullshit of the city and any of its mental illness. Yet everything we do here outside of your matrix, our values, our lives, our pursuits, our desire for privacy and seclusion, our desire to be left alone from the machine that eats both the wilderness and the free spirit of man—everything we do away from you people and your nightmare of a civilization has no value because it has no place in your scheme of legibility, coersion, and control, because it is a sphere of freedom that will never willingly be relinquished, because men of death and darkness burn in the presence of light, burn in the energy of free men, are deafened by the laughter of wind.
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