(ADVANCED AND NOT SO ADVANCED THEORETICAL SPECULATIONS)
INTRO. MONO and DIA LOGIC
Dialogue, dialogue! Why is this MULTI paradigm everywhere?
Why did the singularity become so unpopular? As if any
independence is a completely asocial -- to the point that we even
have no means to discuss it. Anything unconnected became
non-existing. As if the field of thinking belongs exclusively to
the communal. Multi-vocal mind replaces "I" with "We." We fear to
be disconnected and lost -- but why? Isn't the break away from
"us" the only possibility of the New? Are we talking about the
dialogue because we do not have it? We wish it. Everything
technology brings in is nothing but this desire to overcome the
singularity, being a man -- Adam. But not at the Resurrection
time when Adam is in a position of God, the only and only one.
What kind of dialogue could God have? Nietzsche saw this flaws in
dialectics. But we afraid of silence. Oh, we resist our fate as
always.
Down with the discipleship! Never teach! Question the
learning itself! Send away them all! Send yourself away, I have
nothing to teach myself! I am a primitive author who never heard
about copyright laws. I never read myself. I never saw myself in
the mirror. I have no photos, because it's impossible to
photograph the future or the past. If only you can grasp the idea
of resurrection! Not the past and the future vanish in eternity,
but the present! If the future is a return of the past, the past
is the future of future! Present time? Time is always PRESENT.
That's me -- the NOW. That's why it's painful to live in
paradise.
I want to forget about the world. Forget myself. Why should
I remember so much which is always out there to force itself on
me? My questions and answers are exclusively MINE own concerns. I
guess, you don't understand how depressing is the fact that I
never met myself and never will. I am the one who is missed and
ignored by all, un-noticed and un-recognized. My world is
unbalanced.... with a little attention to my being, including my
own attention. My "ego" has nothing to do with me, with my
relations with the outside. I have no respect for my life and
only the society of discipline and control has developed
technologies to watch my presence. I better learn how to be
personal and generate the time -- my only space of living.
.... I miss it, the talks of my youth. We would talk for hours, through the night, I and my friends. "What are talking about?" my father would ask. About everything -- about us, life, books, politics, future, past. We talked as if we were silent for centuries and we rushed to say it all. We talked abut what we knew, we share, and about what we didn't know. We argued, screamed, fought, as if the subjects of our discussions were the most important, as if it was matter life and death.
I do not have it anymore. I feel that soon I won't be able even to speak. I am so used to talking that I can talk even when there is no other to converse with me, as long as there somebody to listen. But the birth our first child, she wasn't listening, she simply was there. How do I know it? You know, you always know, when you are alone.
(Dialogic Monologue) Our descriptions of man are no less
complex than their definitions of God. What separates the two?
Nothing, if you see it from inside. What is the outside view?
That's would serve as the Other, a negation of my existence, but
never a primary sense of myself. Even an ability to see myself
from outside is a developed ability, result of learning and
experience.
"Dialogism"? That's right, it's God's "philosophy." Two
logics? Get use to it.
.... The house was big. Two story with porch and the big basement. There was a stearcase to the big attick with a window. The big old trees were in front and behind the house. That was the first house I owned. I bought it with money down, as they say in those foony commercials. I had a job and Bob Ashcraft, retired airforce officer, offered me owner-financing. He would come to see how I work on this old house and would teach me how to do the floors or to scrib the paint from the hardwood doors. He wanted to talk. He wanted to know me and my story. He was a millioner, he owned around fifty houses in Roanoke. I own only this one. And I talked with him. About Russia, mostly.
First, about an illusion of dialogue.
PART ONE. MEDIA = MASS
"The masses prefer media to messages." (Baudrillard)
Media is a message? Oh? No message, only media? (Did I say
"advertising"?) Or no media, only the message? (propaganda) We
still don't know that message and media (Mcluhan), form and
essence (Formalism) are always the same!
Media has ONLY one dimension -- the masses. They are always
present within technology. Media monuments? Not a statue on the
square, but the square. Space became a monument of itself. Movies
are architecture. Go to the national parks and see for yourself.
Yes, the movies! We cross the boundaries of aesthetics. We
made art into the material of creation, not a product. Film is
the most radical negation of art (in principle) -- and humanism
with it! They say cats and dogs do watch tv! Dreams are
interactive! We, communists, have the same dreams. We dream not
for meanings, we wake up if we need messages.
But isn't any contact an aggression? Selling is a war. What
else any communication is? Oh? You thought that our relations are
love, not war!
.... Yes, yes, I have to get back to my story, to our dialogues, or was it an illusion? Did she hear me? Did I see her?
"Public Library"? What is this nonsense? Books are screaming for public! I gave up on having "my" library. What is not public? How any thought could be private?
Only the non-existing? "Private" is the non-existing phenomena in
paradise. Media is the paradise....
Derrida (1974: 8) ironically pointed out in his essay "The
End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing" that the "death of
the civilization of the book, of which so much is said ...
manifests itself particularly through a convulsive proliferation
of libraries." When and where "public" becomes a destroyer of the
language? "Mass society" -- the super-public. When everything
becomes public the notion of "public" is lost -- welcome the
barbarians! Why did you say that "public" library is the dead of
the book?
The Book had and always will have natural limitations: one
must be a learned man to read. Books never belonged to the
majority. The literacy, we heard so much about, is imposed on
masses. Television, the oral, was and will be their means of
communication. Of course, they are "mass" communication and can't
be anything less than that. Our books are manuals.
"Book" isn't dialogical enough, we return to orality in new
forms (visions) -- the movies. Virtual is the next.
We didn't notice that television, with a 'grammatology' of
sorts based upon his complex sense of a multi-sensorial acoustic
space.
.... I talk. I believe that love needs friendship -- and friends talk... I did.
McLuhan: The old medium is the content of the new media. Book became a historical "object" instead of being a subject (?)
Use of anything can't be separate from its abuse.
Perhaps Sidney Finkelstein (1968: 122) got it right
when he observed that "McLuhan advises the future
ruling powers on how to preserve the happy servitude[1]
of the new world-wide tribal village."
All right, the "servitude with a happy face" -- forget the
resistance to this consumer capitalism.... No more about
resistance, please. Were did you see it? I have to go inside to
find it as neuroses, panic and pain.
Ah, the double bind of Baudrillard's notion of
resistance-as-object.... A feeling is a celestial body. Very
real. Emotions are THINGS in new universe. The new feelings are
very material. Feeling as objects > as subjects. (Desire in Deleuze; emotions have its own independence, I am only a carrier.)
.... Why "four acts"? Can I break our family life into main parts? I remember the beginning, remember our travels... I know the end of the story.
Techno-Art? Technology is the objectified humanity. Why would we need Art? Why write poetry when so much tv? Hi-tech is within a zone of art. Good enough.
The so-called panic body - and, more recently, the body
in a spasm of contradictory feelings - is defined by
the hyper-exteriorization of its organs and viruses and
the hyper-interiorization of designer subjectivities
(Kroker 1987: iii)Kroker takes McLuhan's thesis of the
'outering' of human senses by technology and turns it
into an emptying into the technoscape and then a
reverse 'invasion' of the media environment. Even
better, the information highway is paved with human
flesh and littered with fresh road kill run over by the
corporate behemoths who are trying to run the road. As
catchy as a Kroker buzz phrase can be, he never loses
sight of the class struggles being waged over the
conditions of access and the social choices implied by
new technologies (see Kroker and Weinstein 1994).
The Situationist Guy Debord (1990: 33) once wrote of McLuhan that
he was "the spectacle's first apologist, who had seemed to be the
most convinced imbecile of the century." Debord also noted that
even a global village idiot like McLuhan eventually realized that
mass media cannot deliver on promises of freedom and
accessibility.
McLuhan was a (Canadian) American, an optimist, modernist in
spirit. I lost my enthusiasm not because of disillusionment in
technology, but in people. Yes, including myself.
Less an idiot than intellectual jester in the humanist tradition of Erasmus's folly, Joyce's wit, and
Rabelais's bawdiness, McLuhan played the clown in order
to infiltrate specialist discourses and cross the wires
of disciplines and satirize them in a mode he called
'anti-environmental'. While McLuhan may have lacked the
sense of folly as a philosophical vocation, by playing
the clown he was also playing at being an artist. He
chose eclecticism over the effort to synthesize. He
used probes, puns, blasts and counter-blasts, and the
mosaic method instead of interactive strategies.[]
The push for harmony creates more contradictions. Our new
order allows more chaos. We can afford it -- the freedom from the
machine, because the machine is everywhere.
McLuhan had a 'deep faith' in harmony and wholeness,
which Huyssen (1989: 10) brings out by asking the
reader of McLuhan's Understanding Media to perform a
thought experiment: ... try an experiment in reading:
for electricity substitute the Holy Spirit, for medium
read God, and for the global village of the screen
understand the planet untied under Rome. Rather than
offering a media theory McLuhan offers a media theology
in its most technocratic and reified form. God is the
ultimate aim of implosion ....
We are more "religious" than ever. We banned theology
because traditionally it puts us outside of the divine. The
conflict between science and faith is a conflict between two
levels of faith. Science is the extreme orthodoxy of faith. No
surprise that the scientists replaced the priests. They are
closer to God, they read his thoughts. Einstein trusts God more
than any church. He, not the Pope, enters Christ's mind. They,
the church goers, are left on earth to moralize, they stay away
from God: he asks too much. They rather be humans and they always
will be pushing the Apocalypse into the future. They refuse to
see it.
2. THE COOL WAR and its lessons
My "artistic strategy" -- I don't have to kill. All I need
is to think. To feel my thoughts.
How peaceful I am!
Could it be -- McLuhan is a celebration of apocalypse?
Prophet of the coming Resurrection! I can't believe it!... It's
always dual -- the Judgement position. Americans are blessed
because the horror of the end they see as good news.
[McLuhan's oral society is, however, marked by an "acoustic
orientation" that is also tactile or, auditive-tactile. What this
means is that orality is irreducible to speech as such because
tactility is for McLuhan a sign of the interplay of the senses,
itself irreducible to haptic sensation.]
The end of the book is the beginning of television.... Well,
the end of an illusion that total literacy would make them into
readers.
McLuhan thought that writing was a supplement to
speech; in fact, it was sandwiched between two
oralities, the first originary and the second
neo-originary, whose unity it interrupted. For writing
separates and specializes and undoes the "tribal web"
by granting the individual emotional freedom (McLuhan
1964: 82-4); it is also civilizing, intensifying,
visual, and uniform. In short, writing is exterior to
the speech whose place it takes and keeps, and this
belief placed McLuhan firmly in the Western
metaphysical tradition as Derrida represents it.
Derrida (1974: 313 and 315) takes the "risk," then, in
Of Grammatology , of thinking of writing as an
originary supplement that takes place before and within
speech.
[To refer to the professionalization of McLuhan's slogan "the
medium is the message" means: if the user of a medium is its
content, as McLuhan came to believe, then there is no barrier to
the introduction of commercials to television (nor to the
importation of programs), since no significant change occurs to
the medium with their appearance.]
The "user as content" -- the media laws give us the answer
about the message -- us. Tv is just a mirror, you know.
3. THE IDIOTS
The smart ones; analysand and analyst: artist is both.
"Lacan himself spoke in the name of 'non-idiots' (analysts)
and, presumably, 'idiots' (non-analysts) as well." You never know
who is listening.
"Watching television made lousy theory." Theory as praxis
(Marxism). Why would we need "theory" when everything around us
is "theoretical"? Scientific and rational!
.... Yes, I promised to be personal and to connect all the topics discussed with my own life. Because when I wrote those very pages, my family was diying....
No time (inside time) universe: we are the time dimension.
"Dostoevsky's work contains no evolution of thought [...]. His hero knows and sees everything from the very beginning." (Bakhtin, 239).
Godhead position. Whatever about to happen did happen
already. Since the event didn't happen yet, it's never about to
happen? Every event is in two excluding positions: being and
non-being. Like in Q Mechanics -- it's a matter of choice, a
decision or a preference? The existence of the world is in
question again.
PART TWO. Deleuze
Raskolnikov encounters his own thoughts as if they were a stranger's: "did I really think [. . .]" (45) could
be the refrain for the book.[4] Bakhtin interprets this
as a Marxian species-existence: "to be means to be for
another, and through the other, for oneself. A person
has no internal sovereign territory, he is wholly and
always on the boundary" (287). Yet this is by no means
a comfortable existence; it is maddening to look inside
himself "with the eyes of another" (287); to live in
the world of a "'second' and not of a 'third' person"
(64); to have his consciousness become "a field of
battle for others' voices" (88) and "his inner speech
filled with other people's words" (238). Bakhtin
describes this interior dialogic as fixed by
simultaneity at one moment, but spread throughout
space: "the fundamental category in Dostoevsky's mode
of artistic visualizing was not evolution, but
coexistence and interaction"2 (28); "none of these
contradictions and bifurcations ever became
dialectical, they were never set in motion along a
temporal path of in an evolving sequence; they were,
rather, spread out in one plane [. . .] as an eternal
harmony of unmerged voices" (30). Indeed, time itself
in its normal functioning is missing from Raskolnikov's
life. Bakhtin writes that "the only time possible is
crisis time, in which a moment is equal to years,
decades, even to a 'billion years'" (169-170).
We have to turn our existence into a crisis in order to have time. Changes must be constant and extreme to produce TIME (sense of being present). At the highest point of the catastrophic --
time disappears again. We are between those two poles.
Experiential: I try to record my feelings.
Each one is wrong not because the others are right, but
simply because the others exist.
....the problem of the "open hero," a consciousness
"which is not inserted into the finalizing frame of
reality, which is not finalized by anything (not even
death), for its meaning cannot be resolved or abolished
by reality (to kill does not mean to refute [nor to
affirm, as in Raskolnikov's case]) (284).
The end of the novel reads as a death of Raskolnikov, it's another man who falls on his knees in the middle of the square. His thought acted out in murder is not resolved but dropped.
To be the hero of the idea requires the abandonment of
interior self to the idea (87) and the courage to let
the idea manifest itself externally, to act: "the idea
is a live event, played out at the point of dialogic
meeting between two or several consciousnesses" (88).
Man of the ideological time: "To occupy the threshold is to
lack sovereignty of both physical and mental space, but it is
also a position of articulation, of intelligence, of perception,
of sensitivity, and of artistry.... Subject to multiple
dialogic discourses, he is loyal prisoner to none."
In no sense is confession a form or an ultimate
[closed] whole of his art [...]. He depicts
confession [...] in order to show that they
(confessions) are nothing other than an event of
interaction among consciousnesses, in order to show the
interdependence of consciousnesses that is revealed
during confession. I cannot manage without another, I
cannot become myself without another; I must find
myself in another by finding another in myself (287).
.... You broke my heart, Esther. I don't know if I ever recover. I don't think that you understand....
[8] Justification for the use of "spiritual" to
describe this relational encounter may be found by
comparing with Martin Buber's unabashedly spiritual
"I-You" encounter in I and Thou (1923). In Buber,
"being" is found not in self-possessed "experience" but
in lived relation[3]: "Whoever says You does not have
something for his object [. . .]. But he stands in
relation" (55). Compare this with Bakhtin's dialogic
consciousness: "I am conscious of myself and become
myself only while revealing myself for another, through
another, and with the help of another. The most
important acts constituting self-consciousness are
determined by a relationship toward another
consciousness (toward a thou)" (287).
A similarity can also be drawn between Buber's encounter and the second-person confrontations of Dostoevsky's world: "man encounters being and becoming as what confronts him [...]. The world that appears to you in this way is unreliable, for it appears always new to you, and you cannot take it by its word [...]. It comes - comes to fetch you" (83). Finally, like Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, Buber sees the determining of an actor
after the act as a possessive, non-relational illusion: "Only
then [after the encounter] is the memory of that which was
unconsciously absorbed every night kindled into the notion of an
agent behind this action. Only then does it become possible for
the You that originally could not be an object of experience,
being simply endured, to be reified and become a He or She" (71,
my emphasis); "The original drive for 'self'-preservation is no
more accompanied by any I-consciousness than any other drive.
What wants to propagate itself is not the I but the body that
does not yet know of any I [...]. Only when the primal
encounters, the vital primal words I-acting-You and You-acting-I
have been split and the principle has been reified and
hypostatized, does the I emerge with the force of an element"
(73).... Of course, all three thinkers would disagree radically
on the idea of absolute presence.
What could be a better Other, a better stranger than
somebody who is dead, who is from another culture, who you never
met.... like Nietzsche.
PART THREE. BAKHTIN and ANTI-BAKHTIN
Carnival: ideas and emotions. Emotional ideas (ideology and
art) and smart emotion? They can't be fully separated.
Folk-carnival "debates" between life and death,
darkness and light, winter and summer, etc., permeated
with the pathos of change and the joyful relativity of
all things, debates which did not permit thought to
stop and congeal in a one-sided seriousness or in a
stupid fetish for definition or singleness of meaning
-- all this lay at the base of the original core of the
genre. This distinguishes the Socratic dialogue from
the purely rhetorical dialogue as well as from the
tragic dialogue[4].... The Socratic discovery of the
dialogic nature of thought, of truth itself, presumes a
carnivalistic familiarization of relations among people
who have entered into dialogue, it presumes a
familiarizing of attitudes toward the object of thought
itself, however lofty and important, and toward truth
itself. (132)
We keep forgetting to mention that a carnival has to have
laws and truths to revolt against. They don't replace the order
but play with it and as a result -- reinforce it, giving it a new
life. Not a revolution or even a change but further
institutionalization. We know that a person who has imitators and
parodists did make it into social history. In fact a carnival has
little originality in it, it's reflective.
Perhaps in the solitude and silence of a closed
society, one can hear the voices of a universal
cultural community better than in the midst of an open
society that encourages and even enforces the
appreciation and understanding of other social
dimensions of science and culture. Moreover, concepts
about dialogic communities, the great cultural epochs,
or the transnational or universal work of culture
emerged as an intellectual shelter in the oppressive
Soviet atmosphere. (?)
.... [ image ]
ANTI-BAKHTIN[5]
He has to be against himself in order to have Self. He is
me. Yes, it's possible to be in contradiction with himself and
not in conflict.
The dialogism is the alterity/Otherness, identity formation,
inter-subjectivity. Structuralistic binarism breeds dialogism...
Oh, no! The dialectics, again. Something mechanical and boring in
it. The formula.... I accept the clash of the opposites and even
the synthesis. But Merciful God, this endless negation eliminates
anything truly new. Madness is excluded, the source of life.
That's why Nietzsche went mad.
.... [ pix ]
My secret war with epistemology is a war for independence.
Marx was right about my total dependency on society and that is
why I fight.
What's wrong with para-philosophical? Writers and artists
are those para-philosophers. Should a composer be called a
philosopher? Dancers? ....
Think: the Bakhtinian paradigm, namely with the notion of
outsidedness, exotopy.
Linetski:
What Bakhtin is actually saying is that "one cannot
prove one's own alibi in the event of being"(1979/1920-1924/: 179). That is, the difference between the original and the translation is the poststructuralist difference par excellence, to wit, the difference between the performative and the constative statement.
Irony stems from the fact that in our case an act of
translation as an act of (inter-textual/lingual)
transformation that transforms the first into the
second and thereby misses its aim which is exactly to
revitalize the original that discursively is always
already threatened with death qua exhaustion, aphanisis
of the performative potential. To emulate the
Bakhtinian idiom, the generally accepted version is the
translation into the dead language, and not the other
way around as it should be according to the theory of
intertextual dialogism.
Remember: from the poststructuralist standpoint, the
impossibility of reading is the possibility of fiction. (cf.
Derrida 1981, 1989, 1991)
PART FOUR. PERSONAL WAY
MY WRITING[6]
I stopped talking, I write. I want intensive conversations.
Writing is a compromise. I write to keep a track of my thoughts.
Of course, it's just notes! I'm still in search of the style of
notations.
Linetski:
"Written speech and inner speech are monologic speech
forms. Oral speech is generally dialogic" (1987, p.
271). [...] "Inner speech," Vygotsky explains, "is
speech for oneself. External speech is speech for
others" (1987, p. 257). Moreover, we are told that
adults' inner speech and preschoolers' egocentric
speech "are divorced from social speech which functions
to inform, to link the individual with others" (pp.
71-72). For Vygotsky, egocentric and inner speech serve
a radically different function from outer speech:
namely, the individualized activity of self-mastery.
Just as action becomes transformed into thought under
internalization (Vygotsky & Luria, 1994) so to does
language. Speech for oneself becomes isolated,
functionally and structurally distinct from speech for
others, such that it is difficult for inner speech to
find expression in social speech. "Speech for oneself
is very different in its structure from speech for
others. It simply cannot be expressed in the foreign
structure of external speech" (1987, p. 261). This is
entirely consistent with Vygotsky's more general
genetic law of cultural development on which he
comments that "it goes without saying that the
internalization transforms the process itself and
changes its structure and functions." (Vygotsky, 1981,
p. 163).
.... No, I don't blame her, it was me, the monological man....
Hidden Dialogicality and (Quasi-Social) Inner Speech:
Imagine a dialogue of two persons in which the
statements of the second speaker are omitted, but in such a way that the general sense is not at all violated. The second speaker is present invisibly, his words are not there, but deep traces left by these words have a determining influence on all the present
and visible words of the first speaker. We sense that
this is a conversation, although only one person is
speaking, and it is a conversation of the most intense
kind, for each present, uttered word responds and
reacts with its every fiber to the invisible speaker,
points to something outside itself, beyond its own
limits, to the unspoken words of another person.
(Bakhtin, 1984b, p. 197).
Why QUASI-social?
The Fugue structure -- see notes on _Lost Highway_ and
Andrey Tarkovsky in Filmm 600.
.... [ ]
Any thought is social all the way, but feelings? New
feelings are produced by thoughts, they are (human) reactions.
Non-human (social) feelings? All emotions must be humanized --
that's our goal.
Listen, listen here: "intellectuals and cultural workers" --
see the difference? Originators and interpreters. All are
performers, must be! More, intellectuals and cultural animaters.
Oh, the Information Age! Who is not a cultural worker? And the
new professions.... "the political scientist and performer of
theory as fiction, Arthur Kroker." Ah?
NOTES
What are those notes? Overview of pm? McLuhan, Baudrillard,
Deleuze, Bakhtin -- all infected by the domination of the modern
over pomo, all are stumbled over the "{critique" of the real,
even when B. denounces its existence. He is a "romantic" inspite
of himself, they all are full of this motivations to have the
idea of universal knowledge. I could understand this craving for
the UNIVERSAL REAL in them-before-me, but not when we're
connected by the Internet. I can't be a communist because of the
traffic lights! We all are communists by our pm conditions. It
will be redundant to search for connections with the world. I'm
overloaded with connectivity. Personally, I wish to get over this
habit of searching for the outside. My experience tells me that
it's time to mature and learn a bit about myself. Don't you have
a sense that on the Internet rush to have conversations with the
world before they had a chat with themselves in solitude? Oh, the
communists!
I believe pomo deserved its second hand name, it has no guts
to break away from humanity. (Same with N. with his super-man.
Why man? Why "some" man?) This echo philosophy was appropriate to
history, not to us, after the history inhabitants.
LANGUAGE OF FEELINGS
You write too much, you think too little.
How primitive this visible world! Even a second hand camera
for five dollars can capture it. Why do you need me? What do you
want me to write about? Film it. Go for a closeup, if you need a
detail a la Chekhov -- and leave me alone. I rather write about
stuff, which doesn't exist, but I have no time for fiction. I
have to write about what you don't see. You don't see a lot.
You don't see, because you don't feel. You have to notice
your feelings if you want to notice things. We assume that we
FEEL -- feel what? You think -- that's what you call "feelings"!
Most of our feelings are feelings at all. And not even yours!
Media is nothing but the generator and distribution center for
FEELING life. As if for some semi-machines. We feel very little
and there's a good reason for it. If I would fully feel my
experience of driving, I probably will have a heat attack within
a few minutes. Of course, I block myself from feeling my
existence, to protect my existence, it's too out there to react!
I'm not trained, not prepared to live. To be alive is
overwhelming! I turn off the child in me, I have to function,
don't I?
Too bad, man. The future comes with more. We already raised
a generation drilled by the video-games, they will be good
drivers and fully computerized. We are developing this new man
promised by modernity, the superman, the material Hitler and
Stalin dreamed about. Man Without Feelings. Impossible? Yes,
you're right. He has to feel something. We have to put in the
emotions together with a few ideas. We have to manufacture NEW
feelings and distribute them for free. Why for free? It's a
capitalism, mister! Charge the idiot for a ticket, he will pay,
trust me. Because he is trained to see movies, sport, gossips. He
can't live without it -- the "feelings." Since it's not his
feelings, he can't generate them by himself, he has to purchase
his feelings like he buys his food.
The NEW feelings are triggered not by your body, but the
mind. You think that Pepsi is good, you believe in it, and -- you
"feel" it. New feeling must be developed, they are not natural.
In fact, we "feel" something which is impossible to feel. Our
mass produced emotions are very human; we think that anything
what is good for all of us is good for. The "natural" man would
find it very strange, but not the man of culture. Socialized man,
I keep calling him "communist" or "American," feels what he
thinks. Since he still has his body with its natural feelings, he
ends up in a terrible clash of two opposite emotional
chronotopes. He goes nuts. And of course, he can't control it. He
was separated from himself through years of constant training in
feeling what he doesn't feel (Marx called it Alienation). He
doesn't know himself and has no mechanism to understand the
problem. In order for our superman to "know" he has to "feel,"
but the poor fellow feels only what he knows.
Nietzsche's war against morals, Marx's fought against the
capitalist ideology -- it's all about feelings. Once you have
installed in the new feelings 98, you can be in, be part of the
big family. Feeling must be updated and upgraded.
Feel-it-knowledge teaches us that what person feels is more
important than what he thinks. That is the difference between the
two methods of the communist indoctrination; in a communist state
-- ideology, in a communist society -- emotology. First --
coercion, second -- seduction. State limits flow of
information,the Great Society overflows you with data. You are so
busy processing it that you have no time for decent, for
yourself, for anything. It's hard to be a philosopher when you
drive car for a living. We all do it, if we want to function in
society and live well.
The post-Soviet communism is very emotional and kind of mindless. We don't have to push you into a bright future with a machine gun, we can lure into it. Sex is pleasant for a reason; imagine if it would be as painful as pregnancy, what it would for a human reproduction. We act in the same manner, the labor pains will come later, when you have no way out, because the future became your present. We don't want you think; you can think it through and discover the circumstances. We fully apply the pleasure principle, excessive pleasure which turns of the mind. Movies are a good technique.
Works:
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929),
translated by Caryl Emerson. University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis: 1984.
Buber, Martin. I and Thou (1923), translated by Walter Kaufmann.
Simon & Schuster, New York: 1970.
Derrida, Jacques. "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of
the Human Sciences" in The Structuralist Controversy, edited by
R. Macksey and E. Donato. Johns Hopkins University Press,
Baltimore: 1982.
"Whom to Give to (Knowing Not to Know)" in The Gift of Death,
translated by David Wills. University of Chicago Press, Chicago:
1995.
Dostoevsky, Feodor. Crime and Punishment (1866), translated by
Jessie Coulson. W. W. Norton & Co., New York: 1989.
INTRO. MONO and DIA LOGIC
