AmericanBook
Guide Page
The Possessed 2003
WRITE : nonfiction
Summary
Anti-Oedipus Sophocles.05 *Questions
Notes
2004 & After
|
AmericanBook Guide Page
The Possessed 2003 WRITE : nonfiction SummaryAnti-Oedipus Sophocles.05 *QuestionsNotes2004 & After
|
Notes about the War After WWIII, The Cold War
WAR WITH A HUMAN FACEContents:
I. THE WAR OF KNOWLEDGE
1. INSTANT DEATH
2. THE GOOD LOOKS
3. THEATRICALITY OF BEINGII. TERROR: THE POLITICS OF ONE
1. World War III: APPLIED MARXISM
2. AMERICAN NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND
3. WAR OF THE WORLDSIII. ME: MY FRIEND, MY ENEMY
1. THE POLITICS OF ONE: THE ANSWER TO THE TERRORISM OF LIFE
2. RED MERCURYIV. INTERNET: THE JUDGEMENT DAY
1. PRE-PARADISE: DISCIPLINARY SOCIETY
2. AMERICAN JIHAD: PEACEFUL TOTAL WAR
3. PAID OFF FREEDOM
4. HOME PAGESAbstract:
What do Ortega E Gassett, the Unabomber, Dostoevsky and Foucault have in common? Each of them accordingly examines the phenomena of the modernity. Modernity made Time into its prime material. What is the master of Chronos, father of Zeus? Einstein gave his answer -- speed, super-speed. Virilio believes that we all are engaged in PURE WAR. This total war of speed has a human face. Speed and super-speed. What was speed before us? Horse. Well, actually, human war has many faces. Man is in the position of target and weapon of this militarized nature. How does he feel? Very post-modern.I. WAR OF KNOWLEDGE
1. INSTANT DEATH
"On the one hand we have the decline of the State, which is the end of history, and on the other we have a state of emergency, which sanctions the absolute power of the instant.[1]" (Virilio)[2]
The state was too slow. Low tech. Even Marx knew it.
Living in the instant asks for super-speeds. The computer must be as fast as the spirit -- Faster! [Speed and memory are related. How? "Slow" minds. The spirit of truth; computer and Godhead.] Knowledge/Power = instant, short cut through space and time.
Nothing is new.
Run, run! Six billion parallel existences! Hyper-reality. All against each other, that's the pure war. That's why we preach love -- and rush! We need total discipline (order); more laws and more lawyers. That's how the masses use the power (knowledge) -- IDEOLOGY = CONTROL OF KNOWING, processing the power. I am not a friend of your reality!
Their realities, their truths are against mine!In the kingdom of miracles our wishes come true. We have it all. What about my evil feeling? Left unexpressed? Let me see.
Open your newspaper. You don't have to read it -- photos, in color, are everywhere. But the biggest are the advertizing pages. Have you read cover pages? Can you "read" the cover girl?
You heard about dialogical nature of communications. It presupposes the difference between the sender and receiver. The image is prepared to explode at the moment I glance at it. Our relationship is based on a conflict. I don't have what is advertized in the paper. It's not an open confrontation with the image but with the world. My desire stands on the lack of what I see in my possession. I'm reminded that I'm deprived, poor, have-not. What is Hell but a view at paradise across the abyss. The more attractive the picture the more miserable I am. Why don't I notice? Because there's a promise. I could have it... You know that you won't have it the way it is promised. The girl won't be there, only the stupid camera you don't need and that takes lousy pictures.
So, what is the event -- my clash with the ad page? A war encounter. A glance is faster than a bullet.Images kill.
One-time system: globalization through virtualization. The Internet is another step towards collectivization. I'm only a page in the web of humanity. The "Home" page? My home could be only on this web of global village, not outside. I feel like an insect. The best existence I can hope for is the segmentation; being a fragment, not fully integrated.
2. THE GOOD LOOKS
1. The Internet is very referential. By name, word, number. Too many are talking, there's no time to listen to all of them. I need a guide, a processor, a break for the data flow. The searching Internet is a gathering, not a hunt.
2. The 30 sec. bits. One-screen thoughts, must be immediate and aphorismatic. Glance not Gaze.
Surfing takes place on the surface. Never deep. Non-stop.
The message must be transparent. The image is the best communicator in a moving environment. The movies!...I live in Fairbanks. The drive from my home to the campus takes 5 to 10 minutes. There are two traffic lights. I walk into my garage.... Is there a pleasure of driving? Force, power.... rape? Domination. Overcoming fear?
Why have one horse when you can have over a hundred horses? In my garage! I must be out of my mind! Have you seen one horse? The size, energy.... and I need more? Why?
I'll tell you why! I don't want to fight one or two -- my war is with hundreds, with all of you! I need a dragon! I get inside the car -- the weapon. I let the monster to swallow me... nice... the insides, as usual are full of gadgets -- to communicate with me. I turn the beast on! Lights, numbers, signals. What are their messages? All about potential dangers, about things which could go wrong, and troubles ahead. Do you feel good? Yes, I feel good, because they are ahead, not now.
I never walked this distance between my home and my office. I don't even do it in the summer, or when I do have time to walk. Oh, yes, of course, I have a bicycle too.
I'm the one who moves with the metabolic speed, faster than light.[3] Didn't you notice?
Around my house the road signs say that the speed is limited to 15 mph. Further -- 35. Then -- 55. On campus -- 20. I have to limit my speed, because I can move faster, much faster. I hope my reactions are faster than the speed of my car...
No, no! The car is too slow! Get on line, turn on your modem -- go places! That's the speed! The speed of light, the limit of all speed! Forget the senses, this super speed is beyond human perception. Instant! I don't have to travel at all! I beam myself, or the places -- there's no time involved! Time is gone, killed by the speed....
Hit [inline] or [link] -- check the trajectory you just traveled -- too fast to notice the movement!
3. THEATRICALITY OF BEING
"....the virtual theatricalization of the real world." Virilio[4]How didn't you guess that the humanized nature would "act"? It's not just "being" anymore. Pretending? Behaving? Look how the electricity staged our streets! The night city-scape is virtual and very dramatic. The darkness is carved and shaped into new forms. At night you can see our presence in this civilized lighting -- rational, economic, efficient. The intersections, the streets, the building -- we throw the light only at the most important thing. God was wasteful, we are practical. We design our mise-en-scenes..... imageThe mere fact of total recording forces us to act for the camera. We like to use word "performance" -- a machine doesn't act, it performs. But in order to be "working" any mechanism has to be in action and active. No wonder technology is the world of Spectacle! Since we accepted the techno-culture as a main value, we see the first nature as a working machine. The sun performs and the rain works. My heart performs and brain works. When it doesn't, the tech plugs in. We have to fix the kid, aged and helpless grandmother Nature.
Not so long ago being was the opposite of acting. Not in the age of cinema! The crowds on the screen are acting, even if we aren't focused on them, animals and children proved to be excellent performers. And they were barred from the stage! They monopolize the commercials for a good reason; they are natural! They do not act! Any act (should I say "fact") after recording becomes a performance. We call it "documentary" as if it's possible to exclude the fictionalization of the real the moment we decided to "document" it! The disappearance of the real? What is real? The Germans won World War II. Their technology happens to superior. Hegel and Kant rule the world. This triumph of the ideal is the heritage of protestant Christianity. It's not as the real doesn't exist, it serves the non-real. Oh, you, who questioned the powers of God! You, who still think that you live in a material world! Come, step into the third millennium! Let me show you being as an expression, message and messenger. "To be or not to be"? What a joke! Whatever your decision is, it is an act! Act for yourself, others and the Other. The question itself demonstrates the process of watching, evaluating, reflecting! The theatre of one actor is always with you, prince. The spectator is always present.
Do you still think that the world's war against you is the greatest danger? You still do not know who your chief oppressor is? The "instant" is nothing but you, my friend.
Spectacular, dramatic, powerful! If we can speak in such words about the sunset, why should we expect less from ourselves? Our changes, our crashes, our catastrophes must be at least equal to the nature's wonders. Who said that we don't like the apocalypse? We would like to watch it. I like to see the power of destruction and death, when I am safe, when I am a spectator. Or actor.
What would you expect from us, the spearhead of life? When you see the natural disasters beyond our control (yet), don't you know that we have to make much more disastrous events in order to control the earthquakes, tornados and wild fires? Life is no less brutal than death, and we are BOTH! Oh, we'll give ourselves a real spectacle, and we will watch it on tv screens.
We call this war an entertainment. We enjoy this virtual battles. We don't know that we are killed! Yes, we don't feel it because we can't feel ourselves anymore.
If I understand the notorious alienation right -- I'm separated from myself; I'm more connected with the outside than with my own body (or my life experiences, memory). It's very possible that I can still function after my death. My contact with my body is a catastrophe of the communal, a break which has to be avoided. The encounter with myself, the time when I panic. The communists don't see an entertainment as a war because they have no contact with themselves. They have to see hours of it to stay together and stay away from the inner world.
How morbid is the tv set? The power of attraction alone should let you know what you are facing. The new wars are spiritual, bloodless. TV disconnects I and me. Communist is an extravert (extra human!). Animals are the opposite, very self-centered. Humans are the "open" animals. We have to make them into angels. The spectacle of paradise does it.
I know what hand rocks the cradle. Big Brother could be soft and gentle. The great angels of the Christian history are very feminine....
[ Epic Theatre lessons: fun or instructions?... ]
What is an ideological message of action movies? Look beyond the obvious, beyond the primitive moral construction of happy ends. There's more sophisticated mechanism of the visual language. The plot itself is only a structure, we should pay attention to the three textual elements of entertainment (Aristotle). We watch HOW, not WHAT. The car chasing scenes and crashes have their own significance. Physical action (violence) is a simulation and therefore is more dramatic than any actual event. It's an accentuated and edited reality when the drama is brought down stage (close up), when everything non-conflicting is cut out. It's a concentrated time and space. "Mindless" entertainment never aims at the intellect; mind is used for serving the feeling machine. We have to have the exaggerated events because we don't experience the pain or danger. Our emotions are imaginary. In fact, they are not OURS at all! We are only being used to induce the emotional trajectory. (More in VP)
.... imageNo more Red Brigades or Black Panthers. Terrorism is left to the individuals. Militia is media made news. Peace, man....
Wait, I think I hair the voice....
I, for instance, would not be in the least surprised if all of a sudden, A PROPOS of nothing, in the midst of general prosperity a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a reactionary and ironical, countenance were to arise and, putting his arms akimbo, say to us all: "I say, gentleman, hadn't we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will! (Dostoevsky. _Notes From Underground_)[5]"In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we've had to kill people." (Unabomber. _Manifesto_)[6]
I don't see the face. Just a police sketch. It could be anybody, what a bad drawing, not Durher. It could be me. "The Most Wanted" -- one in a million?
In how many words do I have to state it -- super-humanization is the end of man. It's over. I have to be target; a mortal in paradise is a violator. My natural conditions are unacceptable. Our medical wonders are just a begining.... Health is the name of one of laws of paradise. The ideal is very materialistic. Expect to be under constant attack (progress). Smoking wars (remember the salt revolts), they are massive as in my Soviet past the battles of ideology. Pressure, not a prohibition. Slowly but surely. Driving pushes out the drinking. Safe sex squeezes out the gender. Health wars -- body modifications; though powers of mind which is social product and property.... Do you understand how final is your verdict, man?
II. TERROR: THE POLITICS OF THE ONE
The Individual: who needs him? The voice of one man is weaker than a squeak. Who will listen to it? Not even a wife... The Party is the all-encompassing hurricane, fused from voices, soft and quiet... Misfortune befalls a man when he's alone. Grief comes to one man, for one alone is not a warrior. Every pair is his master, Whether sturdy, or even weak... The individual is nonsense, The individual is nothing...Vladimir Mayakovsky (poem "Lenin").1. WW III: APPLIED MARXISM
They say there were thirty and even hundred year wars. I should know, I was born into such a war. We don't know when this war began. We know it will never end. This is the war PERSONAL against me. I am the individual Mr. Mayakovsky spoke about. "Weaker than a squeak." Vladimir knew it, he shot himself at the age of forty. Execution style; in the head. "The individual is nonsense."
But on the another hand, why should this war be waged against "nothing"?
What kind of war?
This is a civil war (or should I say a CIVILIZED one? Even blessed by peace America went through such a war and lost it. Each civil war is a great loss, because it's a victory over the individual, the upper class, the best. I am too old to see the day when history will discover this. Thank God I was born too late to be a soldier. I didn't have to kill. I don't question history's choices. I don't believe in accidents.7 In every revolution of the past I would have been fighting against my motherland, the class. Against aristocracy, whites, southerners... myself.
I am a war, according to Christianity. I have to be eliminated, according to Marxism. Peace, man!
The "War on crime," The "War on drugs," "Cultural wars," "War on war" (peacekeeping)... Alas, they all are peaceful wars with Caring police and loving prisons. Preventive wars are against everyone. The innocent could be guilty. There are my wars, because they are against me. Potentially I'm a drug user, therefore I'm the one to pay for them. Cold wars of a hot peace. Any and every "new" (postmodern) war is against the individual. Against me, personally.
A revolution is a total war, or in the global village we might call it a civil war. My relative physical independence has to be overcome. I have to be a fully integrated part of the machine. A Communist revolution in the form of cultural revolution (technology).
WW III should be viewed as an ongoing global civil war. A war of the worlds -- My worlds.
"The individual is nonsense."Me? Living Nothing. An intelligent man can't become anything. There is a picture of such a war:
It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything. Yes, a man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless creature; a man of character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited creature. That is my conviction of forty years. I am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows. I tell all old men that to their face, all these venerable old men, all these silver-haired and reverend seniors! I tell the whole world that to its face! I have a right to say so, for I shall go on living to sixty myself. To seventy! (D Notes)
I am forty seven, forty eight....
Let me take a breath....This is a reaction. Yes, to the world. The answer? The Unabomber. We learned it in the elementary mechanics: action-reaction! The most depressing fact in the story of the Unabomber that he is a reaction. Instead of being a new question to answer.
Power breeds protest. We know, professor (Foucault). Some choose drugs. Including the bombing. Using the government (a mailman) as a messenger? Did you expect good news?
It's a long story.
Before the Arabs and the IRA there were Russian terrorists. They were children and grandchildren of Russian nobility who had time to reflect on itself, Russia, and life in general. They lived in our time, they were ahead of their history. They were Americans. Us. In the same situation. Millions of Russian objects were serving a few, the privileged, the best and brightest. And they destroyed themselves. The American Age of Plenty, including semi-education and pseudo-leisure time, finally produced American terrorists. Terror is the politics of the existentialists. Resistance to a totality of power (Dostoevsky's Wall) is (must be) extreme. War to the death! But how could this happen? An underground in a free country? Take a deep breath. The Unabomber or Oklahoma-bomber (Timothy McVey), they are Americans. Who do you think is shooting American presidents?
How typical of being isolated is Ted Kaczynski's case? How do we judge it? What is an American underground? It's a silent majority I, an individual, the biggest minority, am deeply silent. Who is silent shall speak. Who are they? "White males"? They don't march in millions to D.C. (they did it in the sixties) -- their cause is illegitimate. They are the oppressors. The masters. (Ethnic Russians were seen as rulers of the USSR while they were destroyed the most by being in a position of majority).
Modern terrorists fight state(s) -- the Palestinians, the IRA, Freemen. The post modern (single) terrorist -- history. He is alone. Now it's personal, not like in the sixties. He has no comrades, only enemies. He bombs of his own! It's a petty revenge, like a drive-by shooting. He, our hero, targeted universities, not the government. What? The thought must be destroyed. Yes, a preventive strike, like them, the system, the world in dealing with me. (Self-censoring -- next). With a bomb against ideas?
Life is a war, Teddy. Now is more than ever.
Violence?
Speed is violence, according to a French man, Paul Virilio. Energy, any presence of life, is violent. What about "concentrated time," quality time and life, the American way? Total war....Do the Europeans know more about us than we do?
Who is he, a lost American soul?8 American Raskolnikov, a math professor, Dr. Faust in USA.... Ted Kaczynski..... imageIs there any news on the Unabomber? No news.
Who cares?
"The individual is nothing"..."The Unabomber is a tiny, dark void at the center of the Information Age, where nothing is secret and no one is unknown. He has eluded us in an age when dime-store analysis, sound-bite therapy, and the secrets of former intimates can all be turned on any of us, bought for cash or gotten for fame.
Not this man's life. The Unabomber slid through Harvard and Berkeley, little-known and little-liked. The country's best academic institutions seem not even to have put a dent in him. He made no connections worth repeating, shared no revealing insights, left no tracks that can be followed or made much sense of.
Newsweek's cover this week reads, "The Mind of the Unabomber," but there was nothing in the package that told us a thing about this twisted mind. "Odyssey of a Mad Genius" was Time's cover, but an odyssey requires that we share in the landmark details of the voyage, and Time couldn't find any." (HotWired)[9]
You leave a man without country, family, woman, child -- and you expect him not to notice it? You better kill him before he blows up. Schooling, disciplining and controlling -- how much protection could you, the people, produce? The laws, more laws!
Merciful Heavens! What do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic, when, for some reason I dislike those laws and the fact that twice two makes four? Of course I cannot break through the wall by battering my head against it if I really have not the strength to knock it down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because it is a stone wall and I have not the strength. (D Notes)Extreme power begets extreme reaction. Total rejection. Absolute disregard for an individual breeds his dismissal of the real. Nihilism is my reaction to traffic lights. And further -- to gravity. Nihilism? Look how far thought took us -- we are flying!
.... imageWhat could I possibly ask for? Recognition?
"The need for power"? He, the Unabomber, himself is a part of the problem. He is alive. He is present, not fully a simulacra. Not yet. (What about Charles Manson or David Koresh?) Why would an individual seek "power" in paradise? Does he need to be reconnected (directly) with the "masses"? Why?[72] We can do anything we like as long as it is UNIMPORTANT.[10] UBThat's our freedom (of mind). Why would I wish to be in charge of the social life again? Russian intelligencia (and the great Russian culture of the 19th century) was born because the Russian aristocracy lost its governing function. Why should I trade the artist in me for an officer? To help "them" and to have a better life? Not again! Not peopleness, not a servant of humanity...Read Ortega de Gassett:
By mass -- as I pointed out at the start -- is not to be specially understood the workers; IT DOES NOT INDICATE A SOCIAL CLASS, BUT A KIND OF MAN (A) to be found today in all social classes, who consequently represents our age, in which he is the predominant, ruling power. We are now about to find abundant evidence for this.Academia is intellectual labor, mental workers. The source of genetic, electronic, and all other revolutions? Mass production of knowledge make me into a mass man. Yes, I am against myself. Self-conscious life is suicidal.
Who is it that exercises social power today? Who imposes the forms of his own mind on the period? Without a doubt, the man of the middle class. Which group, within that middle class, is considered the superior, the aristocracy of the present? Without a doubt, the technician: engineer, doctor, financier, teacher, and so on. Who, inside the group of technicians, represents it at its best and purest? Again, without a doubt, the man of science." (XII: THE BARBARISM OF "SPECIALIZATION")44. But for most people it is through the power process-having a goal, making an AUTONOMOUS effort and attaining the goal-that self-esteem, self-confidence and a sense of power are acquired.[11]The Right uses the methods of the Left, the terror. The Left is an establishment now, the ruling majority with the president in the White House. Terrorism is a naked strategy. Christ was much more radical in his terrorism of thought, the war against all. (see Red Notebook, the end).15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality.[12]How come he couldn't get together with the religious right, or the militia, the red necks? The organized right (political, republican). His reaction to the Oklahoma bombing. He didn't know at the time (no radio, no tv). What about LP?
The Devils? No, only alone. Demons are lonely.
The Left rejected him.16. Words like "self-confidence," "self-reliance," "initiative", "enterprise," "optimism," etc. play little role in the liberal and leftist vocabulary. THE LEFTIST IS ANTI-INDIVIDUALISTIC, PRO-COLLECTIVIST. (A)13 He wants society to solve everyone's needs for them, take care of them. He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his own ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs. The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser.[14]2. AMERICAN NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND:
It's me, my mind. And maybe, yours."Notes from the American Underground" -- American mind (soul?) is the underground. While America publicly celebrates athletics, its spirit lives secret life. How different is American solitude next to my Russian experience? Or is it American Notes from underground. It's my mind when I am one on one with myself. It's you, when you are alone. America is a paradise of hell, as Russia was a hell of paradise. Shopping mall is paradise when you have money, it' hell when you don't. Paradise is Gulag, any perfect society means limitations. Non-political (emotional) revolution against industrial society, super-society, high society of history.
"Old" feelings must be against "new" mass emotions, tv stream of collective conscience. New (resurrected) sensitivity, re-written priorities (values) -- oh yes, we need around o'clock news. Natural feelings can't be simple absent, they must be replaced, reformed. Aggression, violence and war became genres; crime, horror, action movies. Since it's not my experience but co-experience, it must be very visual, extremely spectacular. "The only gain of civilization for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations--and absolutely nothing more." (D Notes) -- Dostoevsky on virtual reality? How about that!
Ideological mind rejects ideology (cynicism as an ideology), any and all; it can't have any belief. Resurrected soul has nothing to desire; a mortal body is missing, only memory is left. How does a simulacra feel?
I will tell you another thing that would be better, and that is, if I myself believed in anything of what I have just written. I swear to you, gentlemen, there is not one thing, not one word of what I have written that I really believe. That is, I believe it, perhaps, but at the same time I feel and suspect that I am lying like a cobbler. (D Notes)The complexity of "I" can't be resolved, and therefore we dismiss it. Trust me, I'm myself in relations to myself is a model of panopticon.
Then why have you written all this?" you will say to me. "I ought to put you underground for forty years without anything to do and then come to you in your cellar, to find out what stage you have reached! HOW CAN A MAN BE LEFT WITH NOTHING TO DO FOR FORTY YEARS? (A) (D Notes XI)In America, we thought that "live and let live" is enough.
Soviet sounds: freedom in (of) jail. [Freedom? Why the Greeks never talk about it? Freedom from my body? From the world? What a nonsense! Said Marx] Paradise is a deal: everything is taken away in exchange for comfort. Devil's proposition? Underground in paradise said: Paradise must be rejected.
Under the state communism my emotions were of a business of state (KGB). Under social communism they are a matter of television. You are instructed how to feel, you learn.
20. Notice the masochistic tendency of leftist tactics. Leftists protest by lying down in front of vehicles, they intentionally provoke police or racists to abuse them, etc. These tactics may often be effective, but many leftists use them not as a means to an end but because they PREFER masochistic tactics. Self-hatred is a leftist trait.[15]Christ?
Fulfillment = fake destiny, surrogate activities. What about his own manifesto? Existentialists and their pomo offsprings talk about self-made individuality. Millionaires, homosexuals, self-made men -- all. Who is not?Hyper-sensitivity is a mark of pseudo-humans (minorities) (?).
"Imposed changes" [57]. Frustration because everything is man made, not a fate anymore. [70] How super-sensitive man became! The humanity gained so much power and I think that it's mine. The Soviets were proud of their nukes. We don't accept anything anymore, and I follow the same path -- I reject the power of society over myself. I have the same attitude. I disagree with everything. I'm personally a measure of all things.
Revolutionary reformers?
[109] The American Revolution does not provide a counter-example. The American "Revolution" was not a revolution in our sense of the word, but a war of independence followed by a rather far-reaching political reform. The Founding Fathers did not change the direction of development of American society, nor did they aspire to do so. They only freed the development of American society from the retarding effect of British rule. Their political reform did not change any basic trend, but only pushed American political culture along its natural direction of development.[16]Arriving to America was and is the real (geo-historical) revolution. The departure is revolutionary. Immigrant could tell you that departure could be understood, fully experienced, only after arrival. This is an American Journey, when this culture leaves itself almost every ten years. TV generation is replaced by computer generation. AMERICA CAN'T ARRIVE TO ANYTHING BECAUSE AMERICA IS A CONSTANT DEPARTURE. Culture which never took place, only a promise of culture. In Russia it was a catastrophe of culture. Both great historical events of American past, the Revolution and the Civil War, were to sustain this American perpetual development, non-stop at no time. America doesn't know historical duality of revolution and evolution; we made revolution into an evolutionary process. There's no place left for a revolution, we are moving faster than any revolutionary. America has no static energy, it's kinetic in nature. Changes are the establishment in America.That's how we understand "freedom" -- changes. Changes of changes, nothing gets to the point of fruition. Culture needs times of stagnation, it can't grow all the time extensively. Unlimited expansion (last frontier as a horizon) limits maturation of culture. Since the West was conquered in the last century, America moved on the global territory as American frontier. NASA is no less as expression of this expansionism. This is super-imperialism different from previous colonization type. America doesn't know how to keep the difference between colonies and metropolis. Began as a colony, USA behaves as a colony which gained a position of empire. americanization of others, including their diet, producing culture for them as for itself. America can't stop because it has no cultural territory to rest.
We need this assumption that we need "freedoms" -- do we?
[113] ... freedom and technological progress are incompatible.Freedom to have "technological progress" is our choice and after choosing of either/or we losing our "freedom" -- we left only with freedom to un-choose. Freedom is a chance to choose your limitations. Technology is our choice. There's nothing accidental about our desire for technology, we went all the way to have it. You feel that an accident is the only chance of freedom is left for you? Welcome to a club! Unabomber himself is an accident of American social engineering.
[140] "Reform" is our name for "evolution" -- we have to admit that the great Darwinist evolution isn't over. We continue this "revolutionary" nature of the nature itself. We are the nature, the best of nature, and the source of this evolution.We love Apocalypse. The departure, the end, the calamities.
Yes, sir, in forms of technology.[17][84] The System; has survived the attack of the left (it became stronger). Could the revolutionary ("reactionary") right do any better? This is tactics of the same strategy. We all are Americans, our dedication to the progress is bipartisan. That's how we called it in Russia - the System, with a capital "S." Because we read Kafka and we lived it. Interesting times.
Who's crisis? The humanity or mine? Both? Great! Judging by the numbers of the human race, we live prosperous times. Am I a concern for you? Good! Event asks for attention. Crisis is a form of American existence; troubles are the windows of opportunities.
I'm in crisis = I'm alive.
Crisis is our System!Do you feel stressed?
I'm surprised that nobody sued the government for being unhappy. Not yet. After all it's my constitutional right, the happiness. The old traditional teenager's drive for meaning of life replaced in mass times by request for happiness, very American, ie. post-Christian. Christianity promised happiness by tomorrow (after death). With disappearance of time tomorrow is today. "I know what I want and I want it now!" Really? An underground man is unhappy. He misses his life. Nostalgia for a present time, moment and PROCESS of living your life. Missed mortality, even if I don't need it.3. WAR OF THE WORLDS
Since my relations with myself are an institutionalized warfare, what could be said about my connections with the others? They too, are doubles and multiplied within themselves, and we act in both capacities -- friends and foes. I myself am a cause of alienation, and I'm the last space of the private. What could I expect from you? The same.
The view from the third party's position: Outsider? Not in Einstein's world. Is there a difference between the two? Perhaps, my code, name, some physical characteristics, but this is only data. Socially, the two electrons (of the process) are indistinguishable, their differences are negligible as driving records of the many during traffic hour. As in a nuclear reactor the inner relations of matter are broken and the man-made chaos is the source of energy, the social reactor produces energy by cracking the atoms of the human, and controlling the slow explosion. The system organized for a production and not to serve me or you personally. All I can do it's to find my way to live in such nuclear conditions. Never ending education and re-training (ways to enrich the human plutonium) are the methods to keep the material pure, workable (we call it "human resources"), avoiding anomalies and "differences." It's industrial humanism, the best we can do for ourselves under the circumstances. That's all what we can afford as humanity. The American (radioactive) mass is better provided than human material in so-called third world.
Imposed on me power? It's a mutual desire, both sides; the system and the material are attracted to each other. Nobody runs away from America, but to this place. Nobody, even those who run away. What the old world could offer me? America knows how to get most out of me, how to take it all. I would give my 100 percent and it will be received (and supported by rewards).
I'm in this process on my own will. I want to be used, I don't want to be wasted.
Internet as human reactor? Is this another allegory? Metaphor?
"Concepts are mental images" (Virilio). I bridge sciences only because they are interconnected. Nuclear reactor is possible because of the knowledge produced by our modern sensitivity, the same sensitivity which accompanies my everyday routines.Defending Dostoevsky (in _Madness_)
I as the Other. What about the "Other"? Other? A child, woman? Not anymore. We all the others. Our meeting isn't of two but gathering of many. I myself am a crowd. I look for another to release myself from myself (we call it "sharing"). I'm too much for myself to handle. I need help, -- and I am not about to help. I'm too much in pain and panic to think or even to imagine you. I do not give. I throw myself at you, attack, force... and get the same back. This is a natural position and all what we can do it to cover it, to control, to make sure that the natural tendency of this process wouldn't get out of hands. In nuclear engineering they named it "cooling."
Now, you tell me -- would you be interested in finding your "second half"? Oh, we search, we cruise, browse, we try to stay close, we bounce and gravitate (after all some sex isn't outlawed completely). But in paradise our union is un-natural, it's more of a deal, friendship of Adam and Eve. Much the same way I try to be my best friend.
Time and again I see that from the outside, my uncertain identity could be easily assigned to you. What is this "I"? With horror I think about being in your body, calling myself "I" -- and at the same time I see no principles which would prohibit such a swap. (What about my non-acceptance of my present body?) This other "I" has the same emotional features, the specifics only differ. Instead of the other I keep seeing the other me. This mental torture of reincarnation when I continue to stay in my original body, tells me again and again that I'm just a concept, a construct. Don't we know it by now? I'm a fiction. And this viewpoint is no less legitimate than its antithesis. This final blow of communism from within crashes all my efforts to construct my identity, years of labor and the primal Hegelian pride. I don't know why do I call myself "I"? In silence I meet the world of the outside communism which smiles at me -- I told you so.
The animal in me is destroyed and looking at you, I have no rationale to determine what it should be my and not your way. The same. Why not his? I'm nothing, not the nothing of the underground, borne at the time of Stirner's Oneness. Not even of the Apocalypse but the Resurrection, when this no-being has nothing even to separate itself from the being.
III. ME: MY FRIEND, MY ENEMY
(Problems of mass-man are my problems)To our father, grand-dad, and brother -- Mr. Nietzsche.
"The point is not just to describe the world; the point is to change it." (signature on an Internet's message without credits to Marx.)
They are poor and they are ugly. They are the power. We, the people, who were the last and became the first....
Who needs your confessions of love or hatred?
Indifference? How else shall I react to this ongoing crisis?
All right, I'm a conflict and cause of it. I have my mind, heart, soul, spirit. I'm the conflict of those four. Problem solving is a movement from one problem to another problem, always bigger one. Live with it.
Unabomber and Foucault are brothers: reaction to panoptic environment. All three natures are tyrannic; the mother-nature, the father-nature (history) and my own inner world. Nothing but panopticon! In 1968 Foucault learnt his lesson of conservatism. Like this suspended execution of Dostoevsky who was a socialist in his youth. For his harmless underground participation in "direct action" group, he was sentenced to execution by a firing squad, brought to the prison yard, they put the bag over his head -- and for a few minutes he was waiting to die... Then they read the new sentence -- seven years in Siberia. He had seven years of hard labor and several minutes to recognize the positive nature of power. It was hard learnt knowledge.
Why can't I be as radical as my time was to me?
For the sake of love, don't love them. Don't trivialize love. You don't have to hate them; enslave them.
We afraid to be cruel. We are human. What about the brutality of the Just?
Why to fight a war which you can't win? I'm fighting for myself. I have no choice -- I can't rest till my victory. If I won't win, I die... They never leave you alive. I'm not defeated till I fight, even knowing that there's no final victory for me. Stoicism is depressing. Action is disgusting.
Civilization is nothing else than the attempt to reduce force to being the ultima ratio. We are now beginning to realize this with startling clearness, because `direct action' consists in inverting the order and proclaiming violence as prima ratio, or strictly as unica ratio. It is the norm which proposes the annulment of all norms, which suppresses all intermediate process between our purpose and its execution. It is the Magna Charta of barbarism.
It is well to recall that at every epoch when the mass, for one purpose or another, has taken a part in public life, it has been in the form of `direct action.' This was, then, the natural modus operandi of the masses. [G. VIII]We denounce violence. That's where everything began, that's our true homeland. The problem is the negation of violence by our civilized technology (humanity) doesn't eliminates the violence. To be true to dialectics, this negation institutionalizes violence. Violence becomes a foundation of our world. Overcoming the violence we increasing its powers. Ted is a prisoner of modernity, he is an activist, he is not desperate enough....
According to marxism: the individual is produced by both natures. Mother-Nature is included in our second nature (history). "Individual" isn't "natural" anymore, and never was, he is especially not welcome now. Only a dispersed persona, a liquid individuality, ready to fill in any social form (function) -- parent, driver, taxpayer, etc. Of course, I insist that I am the subject not an object of culture. I had to fight against both great gods.
"He, an individual, wants his powers.
"The world is a construct, and self-consciously so, a piece of thought, mediated by all the concepts and imaginings which give it shape." ()Unabomber speaks?
I was educated to live the paradise and I had to re-educate myself to accept the life of the Apocalypse. I had no idea that life after death looks like that! I have to retrain myself every day, and this couching is never done. Paradise is a rehabilitation camp where cultural wars accepted as laws of nature, constant as gravity and light of day.
I have to work on myself, because they are working on me non-stop. I'm wired and I have to re-wire myself everyday in order not to lose my independence.
Don't lie to yourself. Lie to them.
What's my problem?
"Together" is the curse. Don't you know what communism breeds? Common good => Technology (good evil). But we would put on trail the notion of "good" of "common": what about "common sense"? Common wealth? Remember, the SYSTEM! The many, the others, them = collective power. You are not convinced yet. How about a collective stream of consciousness -- the Internet. Video environment is gaining the depth. Behavior modification: the number of public messages (ideological commercials) increased; anti-drugs, against physical violence, propaganda of education, etc. Infomercials. Conversion of unabombers. TV never sleeps. There's no day and night in new universe. Broad-casting. Inform? I'm a veteran of the Soviet Gulag, I know how prison smells. There's no such thing as information; everything is an ideology. I know the rules. The birth of any data is motivated.IDEA OF IDEOLOGY; emotional thought.[18] 1 + 1 = 2. A statement, not a discovery, not an event. 1 + 1, pause, equals, pause, raising action... TWO! Wow! News! We have to de-familiarize the banal, make it fresh. Thus, one plus one dog is not the same as one plus one apple. The systematization is removed: we can watch the same under the name of "premier." (Read Frazer on behavior of primitive mind). If knowledge isn't emotional (fun) we're not interested.
In the world of diversity we don't know what is important -- it depends (relativity). It has to be framed as important, be presented as such, dramatized.
... imageWhy can't we name the reason for my and your intellectual fear? Like medieval mind can't force the tongue to curse God. Let me help you. Let me say it first -- the hell with humanism! You see, nothing happened. Because nobody cares, no one is listening.Max, do you know that to be against the human race is to be against your own (self)? Stirner, sir?
I have MY ideology!
Nothing matters but me, the one who matters nothing. The underground man is for himself. (Assertive or selfish?) Next -- declaration of war. To all and everything. I'm a party of one, and I have to defend my special interests. They are global, universal, and out of your reach -- my freedom to understand. My only territory is something unknown to others, to all. Who can take it away from me? This intellectual frontier is all what I care for, this is my land.
...Unabomber, who the hell is he? "We (FC)"? Does he appeal to me? People, who are the human machine of the progress? An invitation to change the world? The revolutionary? Not again! How about some understanding? Who are you? An anarchist? Get lost! Not me, no, sir.
Ted Kaczynski is not an environmentalist, but an American freedom fighter, a political prisoner of postmodernism? Hermit, monk and rebel? What a child! "There's a little bit of the unabomber in most of us. We may not share his approach to airing a grievance, but the grievance itself feels familiar." (THE EVOLUTION OF DESPAIR by ROBERT WRIGHT, Time).19 He wants to a citizen in barbaric times and his citizen actions are barbaric. We are toddlers of the global civilization.
1. THE POLITICS OF ONE: ANSWER TO THE TERRORISM OF LIFE
If I'm (body, my mind) the last frontier, the metaphysics become a political matter. Party of one, or a nation of one, is no less dangerous than any organized group. I'm a group of my selves. I'm an organization.
It's not a change in social structure but a total denial: rejection of the world from a position of a mortal. (Notes from the Underground and Nihilism. The skeptics. Today nihilism is not about denial of the world but about exploring the nothing, loss, lack, Lacan). Terror, so mush described by the existentialists, has to come into action of terrorism by no-readers, the red necks.
What would you expect from a totally disengaged individual? Should we call him an object (subject)? Total war. It's a war of somebody who lost and who has nothing to lose anymore. It's suicidal, it's final. It's the one against all and everything. (Stirner) There's nothing but a destruction (Deconstruction?)
Individual power: it's a one man show too. Nothing but a show. Why he shouldn't seek a publicity? It's a message to the rest. We only wish that Unabomber would get on drugs and fall into a self-destruction. The revolutionary of the sixties were's desperate, they had their hopes. Even a rapper has some hope.
The Ideology functions to constitute individuals as subjects (objects). "Non-individual" is my position (situation) in a one dimensional (Marcuse) society. All right. Granted. The only protection I have against their ideology (global culture) is my own ideology. How many are capable developing such an apparatus?
(Pause)
Never trust, never!
"Liberal pluralism": another name for soft communism? Fascism could have societal forms, it doesn't have to be a property of state. Do I have to join the party to be a fascist?
Think!Anarcho-communists: the collective shadow of extreme individualism. LP (Libertarian Party): socialist past. Or present?
In our previous letter to you we called ourselves anarchists. Since "anarchist" is a vague word that has been applied to a variety of attitudes, further explanation is needed. We call ourselves anarchists because we would like, ideally, to break down all society into very small, completely autonomous units. Regrettably, we don't see any clear road to this goal, so we leave it to the indefinite future. Our more immediate goal, which we think may be attainable at some time during the next several decades, is the destruction of the worldwide industrial system. Through our bombings we hope to promote social instability in industrial society, propagate anti-industrial ideas and give encouragement to those who hate the industrial system. (Unabomber's Ransom Letter)20Pluralism and socialism: tautology?
What about "class struggle"?
Estranged labor (Marx) = alienation?
I walk through the wasteland of humanized words, trying to understand their hidden meanings. I know about the subtext, I know that not a single word coming out of the media I can trust. That's where he got tangled -- the words........ imageEmpire without emperors: USA? Before we called it "USSR." What else "super-power" could be? "Evil Empire" = super-state. What about super-nation, super-society? Lenin (marxists) called the latest (their modern) capitalism "Imperialism." We are avoiding this name (global society, internationalism, multicultural, etc.) Why?Is USA the only super-power? Why did our hero go after Americans? Not Europeans or Japanese. Is the evil in the heart of the progress and democracy? Sounds like the Iran's wording.
.... imageThe military view: power over other states! President = commander-in-chief? Power or imitation of power (which could be no less dangerous). Super-sized image. We don't have to be a super-power as long as we perform (or seen) as one.Even the American army still resists democracy with human rights and equality. The command. Army is very instrumental in all the changes in the 3rd world. (Russia since 1991 plays the army, which claims neutrality). Also, army as an ideological tool of integration.
2. RED MERCURY: THE REVENGE
How do we send our bombs? Is there a single "normal" American? Attack the stranger. New driving habits. Driving on two-way street. What keeps me from head on head collision? What do you think behind our speed? The anger! What do you think moves the images of spaces on the screen with this metabolic speed?
The Unabomber got several thousand words of his prose published at the start of August in The New York Times and The Washington Post. Price of admission: three murdered people, with threats of more to come. Of course, you can find people with a much higher career body count--Henry Kissinger, for example--in the Op-Ed columns. Bombing one's way onto the front page is usually the last recourse of a President headed down in the polls. It's not a practice to be encouraged. (1995, The Nation Company _Blame Him on Social Science_)21
We bomb with faxes, phone calls, e-mail messages. We attack. What is your reaction to the sound of the phone? Now you know why we all have answering machine.
Do you see the difference between nuclear explosion and information overload? We don't have to target the body, we aim at your mind.
"Suicide is the third most common cause of death among young adults in North America, after car wrecks and homicides." (Time)22
We raised a new generation ("Y"?) on electronic games. Interactive, based on open conflict, destruction the enemy. We don't die in those simulated wars only because we are already dead. Our minds and souls are half-dead. We have to reduce our sensitivity top handle the cold war. We have to shoot down our imagination.
When we talk about the Unabomber, we are talking death, make no mistake about it, whether it is the death of a victim, the death of an overweening society or the death of the killer, if and when he is convicted. We are also talking about a curious kind of killer, one who seemingly kills at random, without a discrete motive and with no real animosity towards his victim. Nor is he a witness to the act; he carries a package to the post office and in a few days he reads about it in the papers. No cries of anguish, no pain, no blood, no thrill of the kill, no regrets, no financial gain, no pangs of relief or revenge, no anything: it is at once as abstract and as calculating as a mathematical equation, and as ruthless as his admitted vision of what the world has become. (Martin Helick: alt.fan.unabomber; MURDER BY BENIGN INTENT)23
Remember our man from the underground? Drinking tea while the world is collapsing? My family dinners with nightly news on. We watch it... We don't know that this is our world is falling apart...
Realization of my wishes? Stop! When everything is possible, ask first -- Do I really wanted it?
Culture is the Disciplines. Technology makes it obvious. My relations with myself are not contractual (I try to turn them into a such). I am enforced on myself, I have to accept myself (my body, sex, appearance, age). I am the first to introduce the idea of power. The need for freedom is born out of my submission by my physicality. I'm the first and most cruel oppressor of myself. Could it be that I die because I can't stand this pressure, this dictate and humiliation? Could it be that the law (contract) was born because of this initial infra-counter-law? If I have a double nature I have to carry on the perpetual conflict, my own self-confrontation and my self-sentence (death, the only power and choice I have).
Abomination -- us, over-humanized humans; everything about us is a violation of nature and natural. Who should we bomb, Ted? Just about everybody.
Unabomber is the reaction. But the Gaze of humanity is "their" reaction to my presence. How could we (they) trust a mortal? The sentences man. Tried and convicted before he was born. Why can't we be happy as before just for visiting life?
In appearance, the disciplines constitute nothing more than an infra-law. They seem to extend the general forms defined by law to the infinitesimal level of individual lives; or they appear as methods of training that enable individuals to become integrated into these general demands. They seem to constitute the same type of law on a different scale, thereby making it more meticulous and more indulgent. The disciplines should be regarded as a sort of counter-law. (A)24 They have the precise role of introducing insuperable asymmetries and excluding reciprocities. (F)Infra-law as counter-law: invisible laws. They say, 150.000 of my brain cells die daily without any replacement -- it's a law of aging. But I didn't know about it. We have to develop the social laws to the point of unconditionality of laws of nature. Than the law and sin will disappear, together with them -- the evil.
In music and film theory the contra-point is nothing less than a method of enforcing the point. Producing the technique within the law which conflict with the formal (legal) expression is making the law self-contained. In that sense law "disappears," becomes invisible, natural as laws of nature. This life of the law is not suppressive anymore but extremely productive -- now I am both a product and a producer of law. Americans are not lawful citizens, they are the living civic law. Something the Party dreamed to construct in USSR, calling it "new man."
First, because discipline creates between individuals a "private" link, which is a relation of constraints entirely different from contractual obligation; the acceptance of a discipline may be underwritten by contract; the way in which it is imposed, the mechanisms it brings into play, the nonreversible subordination of one group of people by another, the "surplus" power that is always fixed on the same side, in inequality of position of the different "partners" in relation to the common regulation, all these distinguish the disciplinary link from the contractual link, and make it possible to distort the contractual link systematically from the moment it has as its content a mechanism of discipline. (F)My name is a contractual arrangement. Imposed and being a part of my identity (shaping it) the name could be changed (the act of my will).25 I could (should) be viewed as two (many) parties constitution. My relations with "myself" are no less complex than the society itself. Actually, I believe, that I represent the society in most extreme (visible) way. [I never had guts to accept this concept and study myself instead of trying to understand the history.]That's why they (communists) consider man is nothing but a social "being" (social should be seen as "becoming"). I am the Other(s), continuum of relations.
We know, for example, how many real procedures undermine the legal fiction of the work contract: workshop discipline is not the least important. Moreover, whereas the juridical systems define juridical subjects according to universal norms, the disciplines characterize, classify, specialize; they distribute along a scale, around a norm, hierarchize individuals in relation to one another and, if necessary, disqualify and invalidate. In any case, in the space and during the time in which they exercise their control and bring into play the asymmetries of their power, they effect a suspension of the law that is never total, but is never annulled either. Regular and institutional as it may be, the discipline, in its mechanism, is a "counter-law." And, although the universal juridicism of modern society seems to fix limits on the exercise of power,26 its universally widespread panopticism enables it to operate, on the underside of the law, a machinery that is both immense and minute, which supports, reinforces, multiplies the asymmetry of power and undermines the limits that are traced around the law. (F)Foucault talks about mechanism of faith -- no wonder that we always had two sets of laws: God and Caesar. The social has to move into religious domain. Killing which is so natural in animal kingdom has to become unthinkable. We should overcome "Shall Not Kill.," we must lose the understanding of this sentence. According to Eckhart, even God himself must disappear. That's where total freedom and absolute slavery meet. Both lose the meaning.
Foucault describes what Bill Gates does. Software isn't a product of hardware. On the contrary, the culture of cybernetics is in programming.
The minute disciplines, the panopticisms of everyday, may well be below the level of emergence of the great apparatuses and the great political struggles. But, in the genealogy of modern society, they have been, with the class domination that traverses it, the political counterpart of the juridical norms according to which power was redistributed. Hence, no doubt, the importance that has been given for so long to the small techniques of discipline, to those apparently insignificant tricks that it has invented, and even to those "sciences" that give it a respectable face; hence the fear of abandoning them if one cannot find any substitute; hence the affirmation that they are at the very foundation of society, and an element in its equilibrium, whereas they are a series of mechanisms for unbalancing power relations definitively and everywhere; hence the persistence in regarding them as the humble but concrete form of every morality, whereas they are a set of physico-political techniques. (Foucault. _Discipline and Punish_)Culture, and the culture highly charged with religious (not simply civic morality) is the real power. The ruler -- we, the subjects, we are not aware of whom is the best (Lao Tse).
Panic and Fear, it came down to them, the people. They, the populists (narodniki), the seekers of justice, they would bomb their will in...
Why, we don't even know what living means now, what it is, and what it is called? Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We are oppressed at being men--men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man. We are stillborn, and for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for it. Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea. But enough; I don't want to write more from "Underground."
[The notes of this paradoxalist do not end here, however. He could not refrain from going on with them, but it seems to us that we may stop here.] (D Notes)
IV. INTERNET: THE JUDGEMENT DAY
(Rethinking the Unabomber _Manifesto_)"Power to the People!"
The Internet. Revolt of the Masses continues. Not only a voice, or a 15 min fame -- more! too much is never enough! -- everybody has to get world wide web page, presence... forever? Internet doesn't unite, it separates everything into subcultures. It institutionalizes every possible abnormality, makes it public, acceptable. What a freedom! Read F. on disciplines. The work everyone puts to be there, to write, construct, to maintain. Big Brother? They call it freedom, they defend it... Then why each of us in such a rush to report on himself? To be heard, to be noticed, to express my little self. To occupy a cell in our human space. Panopticism? That's the system.
Oversocialization? What about public confessions by all of us? Remember, the J Day. No censorship? Right, the trail knows no secrets, everything shall be uncover! The government, not us, asks for a "decency"? It knows the power of society, it smells its own death. Who would need a government after this distribution of power (disciplines) will be in place? The government as a bearer of morality, the church? Too primitive!
Self-punishment. Nation of suicides; I rather kill myself first before it could be done to me by others. I want to maintain a control over myself. When would they come after me? Any minute, I could be in ana accident today. The ultimate prevention of their interference and my interference in my own kingdom. I hurry to do to myself whatever they could do to me.
"Floating population," "mobil society" -- rethink the invention of the wheel. I have the answer: electronics!
1. PRE-PARADISE: DISCIPLINARY SOCIETY
Turning rules into situations. Not laws but situations! Not a brainwashing but behavior modification thorough redesigned environment. What are natural obstacles? Sea, river, mountain, wall, bridge, traffic light...
Total society: "the disciplines are techniques for assuring the ordering of human multiplicities." (F.) The new world order is not about the politics, but new humans.
Why don't we call it totalitarian society? Because our incarceration is self-imposed?
Foucault wrote a new version of "Prince"!
The three criteria:
1) first, to obtain the exercise of power at the lowest possible cost (economically, by the low expenditure it involves; politically, by its discretion, its low exteriorization, its relative invisibility, the little resistance it arouses).
2) second, to bring the effects of this social power to their maximum intensity and to extend them as far as possible, without either failure or interval.
3) to increase both the docility and the utility of all the elements of the system.
First, in consumer society we pay for our own incarceration. Democracy is the exercise of power at the lowest possible cost. Second, the productivity, consistency and totality. Internet is the best recent application of this principle. It never sleeps, multiplicity is not a negative but a positive (desired) aspect of this new power! Third, it has to have self-regulatory evolutionary qualities.
What you should bomb, Ted, are the Disney web pages.
The apparatus of production: masses = capital.
Communism is post-capitalism (even Post-imperialism, according to Lenin). According to historical dialectics (Marx) the next faze brings more efficient mode of production. The goal is "to extract from bodies the maximum time and force."
If the economic take-off of the West began with the techniques that made possible the accumulation of capital, it might perhaps be said that the methods for administering the accumulation of men made possible a political take-off in relation to the traditional, ritual, costly, violent forms of power, which soon fell into disuse and were superseded by a subtle, calculated technology of subjection. (F)A new man, a communist, enriched by humanity human -- and the critical mass of it. Do we need traditional (state) forms of power, when power (structure) is everywhere. Intensive power is deep power.
In fact, the two processes the accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital cannot be separated; it would not have been possible to solve the problem of the accumulation of men without the growth of an apparatus of production capable of both sustaining them and using them; conversely, the techniques that made the cumulative multiplicity of men useful accelerated the accumulation of capital. (F)Global village is a machine, a thing, an organism. It's not a village at all. Human race radicalized no less than an individual.
2. AMERICAN JIHAD: PEACEFUL TOTAL WAR
My war against myself is the WW III. Cold Peace. Militarization of reality (technology) redefines the individual; he is motorized, armed and, of course, dangerous. The powers of militarized world is easily obtainable, and the one, each one, is to fear, to suspect, to monitor. Panopticon is not the cause but the effect. (Driving confessions)
Super-war technologies are made for all to have. The perpetual revolution, according to communist Trotsky and any marketing division of any corporation. The eternal internal civil war? The Internet is the recent, most effective method to increase the competition within my-selves. (The same goes for you). What a wonder! To make us run faster, work longer, to move our workplace into our home. Marx promised to erase the border between the work and the leisure; the communists keep their promises. Inter-net? Nobody complains, we all are ecstatic about this new panopticism. Hey, competition is good for you!Foucault: "the massive projection of military methods onto industrial organization [27] was an example of this modeling of the division of labor following the model laid down by the schemata of power."
What else power (knowledge) is supposed to be? I have no mercy for myself. Should I spare your life? I can't if I would intent to. It isn't up for me or you.
Virilio takes it even further: "We are now reaching the point at which material development is a direct function of military development." (Virilio p. 44).28 It always was the case.The earth has to become a military machine against the cosmos. We fight for our existence!
What could we anticipate from our cosmic quest for power? How else could it be done? America mesmerized by the catastrophe of the Apollo forgot that it was a rocket, a military machine, the same we put a nuclear warhead on. I'm a weapon. I know it. It explains who I will never be trusted. I wouldn't trust myself. And I don't.
3. THE PAID OFF FREEDOM
The price. The marketplace of the new emotions. How does it work?
The general juridical form that guaranteed a system of rights that were egalitarian in principle was supported by these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems of micropower that are essentially nonegalitarian and asymmetrical which we call the disciplines. (F)Our price for rights is our freedoms. Power of a master is paid for by those tiny, constant limitations called "disciplines." Technology is the best to serve the task.
And although, in a formal way, the representative regime makes it possible, directly or indirectly, with or without relays, for the will of all to form the fundamental authority of sovereignty, the disciplines provide, at the base, a guarantee of the submission of forces and bodies. The real, corporal disciplines constituted the foundation of the formal, juridical liberties. The contract may have been regarded as the ideal foundation of law and political power; panopticism constituted the technique, universally widespread, of coercion. It continued to work in depth on the juridical structures of society, in order to make the effective mechanisms of power function in opposition to the formal framework that it had acquired. The "Enlightenment," which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines. (F)
The Invisible Power Structure:
First, because discipline creates between individuals a "private" link, which is a relation of constraints entirely different from contractual obligation; the acceptance of a discipline may be underwritten by contract; the way in which it is imposed, the mechanisms it brings into play, the nonreversible subordination of one group of people by another, the "surplus" power (A.A.) that is always fixed on the same side, in inequality of position of the different "partners" in relation to the common regulation, all these distinguish the disciplinary link from the contractual link, and make it possible to distort the contractual link systematically from the moment it has as its content a mechanism of discipline. (F)Dostoevsky, the Unabomber, Foucault, Gassett, Virilio, the conspirators, are rewriting the contract of power, which we wrote this afternoon. The underground man revolts against the laws which he can't control.
What generalizes the power to punish, then, is not the universal consciousness of the law in each juridical subject; it is the regular extension, the infinitely minute web of panoptic techniques.... (F)This is a net, my friend. The web. We, the hard and software, did it, you and me. We dreamed of slavery. You got it. Have it. POW. Send e-mail to ffaga@aurora.alaska.edu. Over.4. HOME PAGES
The only home left for me -- a web page! Virtual address! Who do you think homeless are? Net, web... the collectivism stares at my face from the screen. As if the tv wasn't enough to convince me of the victory of communism.
...
The Geisenberg's uncertainty principle should be applied to history, interpretive segment must be build in any "fact" -- math calls it absolute and relative mistakes.
Memories of the Russian futurism:
"We are the new people of the life." Kruchenykh.
Sounds familiar?
American "We" -- achieved communist mentality. Republicans with their "revolution" are the agony of individualism and classical capitalism. They are of the past, the rudiments of modernist project. They lost their country in cultural revolution (from Great Depression to present). Next century belongs to communism. If you are not sure, the millennium will prove it. It's time to get over with "reactions" to this fact. Even the most radical libertarians are infected with communist virus -- they appeal to American majority (elections) as if majority was ever in favor of individualism. They appeal to American myths, to something we would like to believe in (Dream), because our present values and behavior are opposite to our fantasies.What 'friend' could you have in such a culture with a term 'girl-friend'? Woman-friend? Partner? Comrade? Sexual revolution destroyed the gender. Man and woman became "we." Not one, as in pre-communist world. "We" -- many, even if it's only two. Many as One? Army. Mongols. Crowds. Traffic. Who said there are no lines in America? They are moving "waiting places."
...Marx forgot to mention that you lose before you born. What do you expect? The society goes after a newborn with a vergence. The conflict is immanent, preventive strike's aimed at a child. I know what was done to me. I see what is done to my children. War.
Marxism, socialism, communism in American (popular) culture: what a tale of misunderstanding! The politics of Cold War on both sides made us believe that America is a paradigm of anti-communism. Despite all efforts to see the nature of Russian communism, we bought this strange notion that the two super-powers were on the opposite sides of the ideological map. Nobody in right mind would question that the source of European religious wars of the past; we know that they fought over the conceptualization of the same subject. The war, the extreme conflict, is nothing less than an indication of close relations. It was so obvious in view of the Third World which was the territory of actual wars in interpretation of communism. American democracy sprang from the same river of ideas as the Russian Revolution. Till recently, America had no need for the state as an apparatus of implementing communist ideas, it could allowed itself an evolutionary transition to communism, which is described as a peaceful transition in theories of revolution. The immigration to the new world was of enough of a revolution in itself.
Marx or even Lenin never thought that the collective property is a trademark of communism. The collectivization was a step to abolish the notion of private property. Only the radical of the war communism during the first years of the Russian revolution tried to abolish the idea of personal property. American "middle class" (somehow marxist phraseology made it into democratic vocabulary) is a proof of the needs for personal belongings. Car, house, tv are attributes of modern living standards. The things which has only a smell of property. The rich and the poor in the United States (upper and under class) are the marginality. The fact of being super rich of homeless does not constitutes the classical class structure. Capitalism was tamed by the communist culture long ago. Just the European socialism alone has more than a century of political experience. The mechanics of production, the technology of economics, do not make up a culture. Marxism, especially, in Foucault's negation, insists on conflicting relation between the structure and super-structure (where else the source of changes are).
Base and Super-structure > mental production > false consciousness... To follow Foucault, we have to admit that together with knowledge we have to produce the ideology (anti-knowledge). We have to cover our discoveries. We package the new, make it common, habitual, and, of course, vulgar. We have to discipline the knowledge itself, to kill it, to forget. Ideology of democracy is more sophisticated than the state communism. The New French did a good job in marking the transition from modern to postmodern forms of socialization.
The dialectics?
Adorno's Negative dialectics -- negation of negation can't produce anything positive. Really?
...The synthesis?Harmonious society is a nonsense. Power/knowledge/society is a life of disciplines (F). "History of damnation": Reality is a constant assault on Freedom -- desires and fantasies? Our illusion projects -- emancipation from the real and enslavement by new structures, our own. We need freedom for a practical purpose of disciplining the world. What is the world without me for? The foundational goal of idealism: freedom of mind.
...
He is already served his 30 year sentence. In solitary confinement. The UB case is closed. He is out, forgotten, suppressed, achieved. He is an abomination...
HELENA, Mont. (AP) -- The former math professor suspected of building sophisticated bombs in an 18-year campaign against technology couldn't figure out how to use a pay telephone, a phone company official said Tuesday. (1996)What did he change with his petty revenge?...He is a message, not a messenger.
For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry and art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims. (Friedrich Nietzsche)To the students of the Unabomber's saga...Alienation is a blessing: away, away from the enemy. More, more alienation, please! Do you hear me? Keep distance from yourself -- love thyself! Make something out of yourself. Create, construct, build a masterpiece. Take advise from the Russian revolutionary conservative: Art is the metaphysics today!... I second Dostoevsky: beauty supersedes morality and truth.[29]
I have a reading list for Ted. E-mail me.
NOTES I have to go to the original hardcopy to restore the note, which I took (kept) in 1996.
(3) Spectacular, dramatic, powerful! If we can speak in such words about the sunset, why should we expect less from ourselves? Our changes, our crashes, our catastrophes must be at least equal to the nature's wonders. Who said that we don't like the apocalypse? We would like to watch it. I like to see the power of destruction and death, when I am safe, when I am a spectator. Or actor.What would you expect from us, the spearhead of life? When you see the natural disasters beyond our control (yet), don't you know that we have to make much more disastrous events in order to control the earthquakes, tornados and wild fires? Life is no less brutal than death, and we are BOTH! Oh, we'll give ourselves a real spectacle, and we will watch it on tv screens.
We call this war an entertainment. We enjoy this virtual battles. We don't know that we are killed! Yes, we don't feel it because we can't feel ourselves anymore.
If I understand the notorious alienation right -- I'm separated from myself; I'm more connected with the outside than with my own body (or my life experiences, memory). It's very possible that I can still function after my death. My contact with my body is a catastrophe of the communal, a break which has to be avoided. The encounter with myself, the time when I panic. The communists don't see an entertainment as a war because they have no contact with themselves. They have to see hours of it to stay together and stay away from the inner world.
How morbid is the tv set? The power of attraction alone should let you know what you are facing. The new wars are spiritual, bloodless. TV disconnects I and me. Communist is an extravert (extra human!). Animals are the opposite, very self-centered. Humans are the "open" animals. We have to make them into angels. The spectacle of paradise does it.
I know what hand rocks the cradle. Big Brother could be soft and gentle. The great angels of the Christian history are very feminine....
Epic theatre lessons: fun or instructions?
What is an ideological message of action movies? Look beyond the obvious, beyond the primitive moral construction of happy ends. There's more sophisticated mechanism of the visual language. The plot itself is only a structure, we should pay attention to the three textual elements of entertainment (Aristotle). We watch HOW, not WHAT. The car chasing scenes and crashes have their own significance. Physical action (violence) is a simulation and therefore is more dramatic than any actual event. It's an accentuated and edited reality when the drama is brought down stage (close up), when everything non-conflicting is cut out. It's a concentrated time and space. "Mindless" entertainment never aims at the intellect; mind is used for serving the feeling machine. We have to have the exaggerated events because we don't experience the pain or danger. Our emotions are imaginary. In fact, they are not OURS at all! We are only being used to induce the emotional trajectory. (More in VP)
Any war is an overflow of life, extra energy, surplus of will. Of course, we'll never give up such triumph of living -- the war! We had to have a total war. We had to transform every moment of living into a battle. To intensify the war is to have a higher level of existence. Ah, thwe horror and tragedies of war! What possibly can I oppose to the law of nature? All right, I can mix war and peace. I can make a PEACEFUL WAR at the price of making a warlike existence. And we did it. I want to talk about the price we pay for not having the World War III. I want to talk aboutthe military peace, the one which foght constant war asgainst all possible wars. The peace which is fully armed and aggressive in defending itself against Mars. I want to make sure that the irony of Orwell (War is Peace) is removed. I wish to move beyond the paradox.... and I don't know how to do it using the language. Human language. How useful or useless are those two words?
But the future meams of expression are geberations ahead. In fact, they would wonder how could we oppose the two? They won't know the difference. They, the future post-human, will learn in the grade school that the only secure peace is the pure war. We heard that if you want peace woy better be prepare for war. We didn't know how the total war or the eternal peace looks like. Do we know it now? The postmodern confusion and the panic of modernism indicate that we aready listen. Are you ready?
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Film-North * Anatoly Antohin
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