PRISON AND PRISONER
(NOTES OF A MADMAN)
"You cannot enslave a free man; the most you can do is kill him!" -- Robert A. Heinlein
Show me a free man and I'll visit his grave, I say.
You want to be free and live? You must be mad.
"mad, a 1. [Insane] demented, deranged, psychotic; see
insane. 2. [Angry] provoked, enraged, exasperated; see angry. 3.
[Afflicted with rabies] frenzied, raging, foaming at the mouth;
see sick."
"madman, n. lunatic, maniac, raver, insane or deranged person, psychiatric patient; *nut, *screwball, *oddball, *psycho."
"madness, n. derangement, aberration, delusion; see
insanity."
Webster New World Thesaurus
Madness is the ultimate freedom. Extreme freedom, freedom from yourself. Freedom is always mad-like, it's a challenge, it's a war. Paradise is white madness of life.
FREEDOM FROM FREEDOM
My writings is an accident. Media accident. Communists and Disneyland failed. What went wrong? Instead of a particle I am appeared to be a wave. My will? Books? QM knows nothing about it. I wonder myself. I am an accident of the system.
I? What I? "I" could be only tolerated?
My individuality isn't my assets by a liability. It never was welcome. From society's point of view I was born to be used (consumed), I was produced for a production purpose. Gift of life? Life is only a condition for labor.
Why do I think that Virilio or Foucault are not products but a by-product of the postmodern? Maybe the mass dictatorship isn't bad after all? More power to them -- more power of resistance to me!
I am an event.
That's what I watch all my life -- myself.
TV as symbol of waiting. Airports, hospitals, keep us restrict, immobile. Passive living, watching life on the screen. The Virtuality is more interesting than life itself. It has to be. It replaced our emotions with a different type of experiencing life -- Spectator's Chronotope.
Spectatorship: position of semi-learning, pseudo-studying, or simply institutionalized situation of an idiot. I have to upgraded all the time, to re-learn, to be "open minded"! Position of a child. They, the masses, have to be positioned as not beings but becomings. How else to force them to keep moving, "progressing"?
The more you feel free, the more you are imprisoned. Dream
situation. The world of a primitive (child), total engagement in
reaction with the world: it was their imagination. His mind had
to invent the spirits, ghosts, angels; his logic, his own
experience demanded it. Now we're manufacturing this world -- the
movies go to attack you!
It has to be as real as possible, and we'll continue our
perfecting of our inventions. Consistency in inventing, what is
missing in nature -- us -- is necessary -- it's our world. We
belong to this world, and the world belongs to us. We're
reversing the property relations. To be in control we have to
insist that we're the subject, not object.
What about reading, writing?
Nothing wrong with prison and being a prisoner. Freedom is another prison (idea). We're not looking for anything but be restricted -- understanding is a restriction. Knowledge is a prison. "And truth will make you free"? Free to be a prisoner. We seek to be limited (Dostoevsky)? That's the name for what we call -- love.
I. PRISON OF MIND AND ASYLUM
"prison, n. penitentiary, reformatory, prison house,
guardhouse, stockade, jail."
"prisoner, n. captive, convict, culprit, jailbird, detainee, the legally retarded, escapee, hostage, con; see also defendant."
Accused.
1. Yes, yes, cries young man in me. He is happy that somebody named it -- the panopticon. Yes, prison! Why should I deny it? I was born in jail, and everything I know about life is a life in prison. I head of other life, a free life, but this is something I never had. Of course, I was told that I am free. You know, innocent till proven guilty. All I know that my guilt will be proven one day. Any crime in Paradise is severely punishable, there are variety of sins and only one type of sentence -- death. Don't you know that? How free could be a man who tries to prove his innocence?
2. Freedom is not what we have, freedom is something we have
to get, to fight for. We born into a slavery -- of nature,
family, society, our own self. Nothing could be further from me
as freedom. Every time I hear "free society" I get nervous -- how
any society could be free? Intellectually this idea resembles
"free lunch." I understand what they say, but I don't know what
they are taking about.
3. Free man? Tautology is an art of public talking. Of course, man is free. Even a last slave has his freedoms. Don't I know that? Too much freedom we have -- my life is nothing but a process of disciplining myself from this free floating dreams, thoughts, moods. Who is free, my mind or I?
4. Could a prisoner feel himself free in prison?
There's a light of day, tender darkness of night, there are
many things free for me to experience. There's such a thing as I.
Most of the time that's the support, the savior, the friend I can
rely on -- myself.
"My relation to myself is thus a meeting of myself as willer, a union with myself and a consumption - appropriation - of myself as my own." Stirner.
5. I never liked myself. I couldn't find in me too many qualities I would like to see in a man. I simply got used to myself. I was there for me all the time, I earned my trust. Me was the best I could find in prison. That was the only soul that stacked with me, who would accept my falls, my sins, my sorrows. I am not an egotist or an egoist, and I didn't choose my companion. But I glad that I have a cell-mate, that I have somebody to talk with. What is thinking as not a dialogue? We both learn a lot from each other, he is the only one who loves me enough to die with me. I'll do the same for him.
I learn to respect him, to understand, to love. If I lose
him, I would go mad, literally. What is personality without two?
We know this, I and me. We remember our loses, many of us who are
gone now. Our common memory made us real close friends.
Yes, we have our problems, like every couple does. In many
ways our relations are nothing but conflicts. What wrong with
that? We care for each other. So, we argue, we fight. Without
each other we would not know what it means to be free.
II. YOUR CULTURE
Zarathustra, I want to teach you Personal Culture.
Is there such a thing available? It must be something new.
It very old and forgotten wisdom of madness. I want to tech
you madness.
1. I'm a self-made man and I had no say in choosing myself.
I have no say in selecting history. My freedom only in what I can say about it.
As in pre-history I have no society, no culture. Only spirits, souls, voices. An illusion of society, an imitation of culture. I'm just a shadow for you. A name. Nothing. I even don't have myself. That's what I am for myself. Actual contact is a miracle and should be treated as such. I know, I am a specialist in finding a close one -- I have to search for myself every day. Remember, you don't have a life, only a potential. You don't have yourself but "you" is a promise. The rest is a war.
What do we fight over? Nothing. Ideas.
Thought, feeling = nothing. Life itself. Time. Nothing is
our motherland. We come from nowhere, looking for ourselves. They
are right, why should they treat me any other way? Communists
learn in Sunday Bible schools that I am a stranger, passing
through. I know it, I was there with them.
I know even more than them. I know that one who's born of
nothing, life is a prison. His own presence is abnormal. His body
is a verdict.
What could one remember about nothing? Nothing I remember
about the before, I know nothing about the after.
... "not a substantive thing .... but rather a process" which cannot be confined within any net of concepts or categorical imperatives. It is "an unbroken unity of temporal experience that is ontologically prior to any essence later attributed to [it] .... or any role, function or belief that [it] .... might embrace." ... "the irreducible, temporal, concrete individual self .... the Unique One; the Unique One is both nothing, in the sense of having no predicate affixed to it as a defining essence, and everything, in that it is the source of the creative power which endows the whole of reality with meaning."
Where do they keep a suspect? Incarceration, of course. Innocent till proven guilty? Not according to sweat Jesus man, the judge. Judgement Day is for everybody. Including the newborns. Including the saints and even popes. Once you had a life you will be tried. Do you have problems with that?
"Not isolation", he writes, "or being alone, but society is man's original state .... Society is our state of nature."
Society is the forest one has to outgrow and leave as his family. The last mountain to claim is he himself.
"I for my part take a lesson from them, and propose, instead of further unselfishly serving those great egoists, rather to be the egoist myself."
No, sir. Thank you, sir. I have nothing to complain. I love my prison.
III. THE IDEA OF MADNESS
You have to be mad to stay sane. Question the basics.
1. Why should they be concern with who I am? Life welcomed me as much as its souls allows. I wasn't aborted, killed, I was raised to understand that I live. What else could a prisoner ask for? Paradise is a humane punishment, unusual and cruel forms of punishment outlawed. What do I have to complain about?
That I wasn't loved, that it was never enough? How much is enough? Oh, you needed more? You teach them. They have to learn how to love. Love is not an instinct, on the contrary. How much do you know about love to tech love? How much love do you have in you? Do you know how to love? How to see love? How to be loved? Do you know what is love?
One who dies every day knows how to be humble.
2. I don't like this word, it was said to many times. This
is not a learning anymore, that is a propaganda. I don't need to
be told ( ), you don't have to sell it to me.
3. Look around. See things as if you don't understand. What do you see?
Media as a thought police. Don't you know why?
Media = ministry of culture.
One dimensional man has no self-discipline, he has to have
outside discipline, but the collective conscience in dynamic
culture couldn't be controlled by tradition. Media does the job
of censoring. Reporting is a process of censoring.
Interpretation of the First amendment in times of mass society. Freedom of speech vs. freedom of mind.
What does the constitution guarantee? That I'm free to
express myself in every possible way? (including cursing and bad
language). Freedom = obligation. I have to express myself even if
I have nothing to say.
The First amendment expects my public expression, my common
presence. I have to reserve the space in my mind for your
expression. We are preparing ourselves for possible expressions =
limiting our own intellectual space.
4. My expression is only potentially public, only if it
processed by the media. I have to guard my thoughts and feelings,
I have to a guard to myself.
5. Watching v. being watched = two types of controlling
(labor). Instructional function of mythology: the entertainment
packaging comes because of the resistance to knowledge -- they
never had active interest in learning.
They have to be captured, they must be shocked, fascinated.
The notion of need for truth illusive: hypers, not pseudo-humans.
6. Imitation of knowledge and imitation of everything else: the spectacle.
7. What is I? And what is Me?
My boy, don't listen to them -- go mad, be crazy. They don't
have to know that, it will your secret. Be a madman who knows
that he is a madman. This is the only way to be sane.
8. Why do I say madness?
Why did they make it a curse? Why do they afraid of madness?
Madness is your only defence.
If you are afraid of madness too, you never will learn how
to see, to understand, to know.
Life is a madness. You know that. It's the nothing which went mad -- what else is life? Man is a madness of life. Life which revolted against itself -- and noticed itself. Madness is good.
"By virtue of insanity" -- why? Remember it.
9. Madness is the answer.
It's not easy to be mad.
First, you have to remember, that anything they say will drive you crazy. Nor them neither you can do anything about it. That's the way it is. Whatever they think is a thought is a nonsense. The only way to deal with their noises is to find out what do they mean. They don't know it. You the only one who can see it. If you understand what they mean, it would give you peace, you would know what you can do.
Remember, they don't speak. It only looks as they speak the same language. It's only looks as if they think. They don't. They think they do. They do, let them do it.
10. Now, you the see it. The forest, the animals around are not against you. They are not you. You are different. People are your natural environment. You don't have to revolt against it, you shouldn't worship it. It simply what it is -- your circumstances, your ground, your home.
Do they rule? Yes.
Do they think that you belong to them? Yes. But you know better.
People live of knowledge, reason, this our nature. You can
understand it, you came from there. You know the laws. A true
madman doesn't show off, doesn't get mad for nothing. Don't waste
your madness, your mind and soul on things which could be
understood. Mind your business, think about what you don't know,
think about what nobody knows, the unknown.
Madness is not for everyone. Madness isn't easy.
I wouldn't recommend it when you outside of civilization.
You don't have to be mad with Mother-nature. Why should you?
Being a madman is being a poet. A tree, a bird, a cloud -- they
are life, not a humanity. Enjoy it.
IV. SUBTEXT AND COUNTER-TEXT
(also see Punishment Before Crime)
1. Foucault:
"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. They have the precise role of introducing insuperable asymmetries and excluding reciprocities."
2. Unwritten laws. Culture is very private, very personal.
Organizational roles of culture = restrictive. Is any "group"
culture is too slow to be productive in our speed-times?
"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. 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."
3. Contractual, legal relations are needed in global culture, where the traditional "disciplines" are destroyed or not clear. Contradiction between the "law" and "moral law" -- primacy of culture? "Rights" are in addition to culture, formolizing the subtext.
"Regular and institutional as it may be, the discipline, in its mechanism, is a "counterlaw." And, although the universal juridicism of modern society seems to fix limits on the exercise of power, 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. 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)
4. Do we have to bring all the subtext out? Do we have to
legalize all the relations? Right to breath, to see, to think? To
make punishable everything?
We would like to believe that we're looking for freedom. Our
need to be linked, to be enslaved, has this name -- liberty. What
would be more restricting than knowledge.
I was born totally depended -- should I look for anything but to be in this position of total dependence? My freedom is only my intentions to be enslaved on my own (and extreme) terms. Love is the great return. Love is rejection of freedom. Life is the most unfree form of presence. Why did we attached the negative connotation to prison? Becaue it done to me, not by me. Do I have problems imprisoning others? Not at all. That's all what I want. The result = we imprisoned each other = society.
We should accept the name communism for our resurrection
age. We would like to lie, we want to pretend that individuality
isn't gone.
INTERNET: PARADISE AS GULAG
"What is truth?"
An interpretation?
No, sir. Truth is an invention of meaning.
Truth is something which didn't exist before me. Truth doesn't exist outside me. In this sense, truth doesn't exist.
Truth is outside of ideology. Truth is a distortion of facts by
MY perception. Ideology is OUR distortions.
Slavery is a state of mind. It's a routine of the ideological
mind.
Truth is a method of self-de-ideologization. I call it "personal
culture." Truth belong to me only. Truth is always a personal
property. There're no facts anymore, according to our physics,
only my facts. (Pilot's thoughts?)
THE PROBLEM:
Knowledge is power (Bacon) + truth is process (Hegel) = my *will
to live* is my fight for present time. I'm the process of being =
becoming. Becoming from Nothing. My war for MY time.
Prepare to live! Write yourself in! (see "Death")
The Gulag was hell. It was intended to be the hell on earth. We
know that the heaven created the hell. Paradise and hell belong
to same place -- another world. We live up the Utopia. Hitler and
Stalin manufactured hell (death camps) based on the same ideas as
in Detroit. It was a production -- of fear, pain, depression. The
feelings. Emotions are the instrument of hell. And paradise. Different emotions, of course.
Hell is always virtual? Fear of physical pain destroys my spirit
faster than the pain itself.
The nineties, the new inventions of paradise.
Internet: being present = being alive. Virtual immortality.
Writer's task for everybody. Self-expression: identity as an
idea. Making sense of yourself. Life is a project.[1]
The Internet is an answer to the old question about meaning of
(your) life. Truth is an invention, my experience. How to invent
yourself (self-help book is to be written by you yourself). My
experience can't be an ideology, I can't impose it, I can't even
share it. The best I can do is to write poetry.
Ideology has special feelings. They are mental.
Factory of ideology?
How does it look like? Campus. A special place. Like cemeteries?
Only in America I noticed it. There are at least three thousand
universities in the United States. Some have as many as fifty
thousand students. Campus is a town (or city?) with village
features. Maybe a college is a most visible presence of
post-modernism. Instead of a draft army we send the youth for
disciplining and indoctrination to school. The more education we
require the more control we would have over population. The
dorms: barracks, monastery, hospital? They eat together, they
consume knowledge in groups; we extend schooling from a few years
of learning to read and write into decades, at least one quoter
of life (and the most active period). Learning is a labor. Forced
labor? At least initially, until they drop out.
To avoid the totalitarian state the American Gulag has to build
the system of intellectual labor camps. Place to enslave the
spirit. "Mind is a terrible thing to waste"? Interesting. We are
concerned with somebody's mind which he himself would waste? Is
his mind our property? Forced "good" -- student as a prisoner.
What was his crime? Or the quiet wars of culture!
Speculations on the subject of "free will" (revelations at the
red light on University and College Avenue):
Free will? Is there a non-free will? Why do we say "free" will?
What's freedom? (Maybe freedom excludes the idea of will?) Our
will to live is our desire for slavery. Craving for slavery which
we call freedom. Internet, the latest innovation of slavery, when
we watch each other (information exchange); connections =
control. New forms of militarization = price for
no-open-war-history (colliding wills). Peace of monastery (preemptive surrender). The second nature has to be no less stricter then the first; future promises us nothing but more limitations. Technology of power (man in a car) are not to free us but to enslave.
Post-industrial? "Post" doesn't mean "anti" -- "post" means it's
institutionalized. Industrial, industrial. We apply
super-industrial methods to production of information. Schools
have to be intellectual labor camps: factories of knowledge.
There's a lot to learn for you to live in such super-socialized
world. (Life as labor of living). Social knowledge is always an
ideology. Ideology is re-enforced knowledge, it has to be renewed
all the time.
Pre-history (end of history)[2] asks for slavery (non-realized
slavery family type). Invention of us, new men; the hypers, the
Americans, or the New Americans, the newest. Post-Americans.
Don't we know that the end is near? Future shock (Today: American
future is our past) had to produce Post-Americans. New feelings:
first -- movies, next -- video games. The past (time we can't
control) is evil. Unless we can make use of it. History-before-us
wasn't in control of time. If we can control the future, we can
overpower the death. We have to mark it, to measure it, to work
it out.
The Tyranny of The Wonderful: Paradise must be an extremely
restricted place. Limitations of TV -- body depravation.
"Airport feeling": enclosure, search, taking away personal
belongings, fastened by belts like in the mental institution,
constant instructions, standard meals. Flight attendants: guards
under the cover of service. Safety asks for surrender of
freedoms. Oh, in paradise you are always an immigrant.
Oh, man, let me tell you the biggest secret of resurrection.
Paradise is a hell of punishment!
Modern punishment: preventive strike.
"Society of plenty" is designed to disorient, to distract.
Newsmaking (form of entertainment) is for preventing from
(independent) thinking (see Entertainment). Costume is a king
(position to be), shopping -- control them, control!
MONARCHY OF DEMOCRACY: state is replaced by technology. We have
more *public executions* than ever before: traffic accidents.
Hyper-power demands instantaneous punishment (the first nature is
perfect collaborator of the second nature). Our crimes are of the
same nature: the violations of laws (natural and social =
super-natural).
I understood that I lost, when my son was five. I knew that I didn't and I won't changes the system, that he is about to enter the world I went through. He entered that world already. He didn't know it. His mother saw nothing wrong. Like my mother who always wanted "like others, like all."
That was Russia. The Soviet Russia. I thought that i can do better in America.
It was better. Esther was home with the kids. There was no Soviet people around. But the war against me never ended. I knew that the best way for their world to defeat me is to go after my family. Somehow I didn't think that will get my wife in order to get the children. Who are they? The devils.
I see you do no believe in evil. Maybe you should some other book.
I lost again. That is why writing. To record it.
Mistrust is the name. Everything around me is build on premisses
of suspecting my rebellion. Should I trust you? Can I trust myself? Society is born by living together without trusting each other (opposite to the family idea). The more I'm socialized the less "trust" is around. Our drive for safety has to produce
regime of mistrust.
I'm being black mailed all the time by the humanity. How personal
is this man hunt? The suppression of an individual has to
increase; yes, sir, after the one, the mortal, could be in
position of absolute power (remember, the tree of life, and the
original sin). Our recent (political) cults of personality (how
about the present "celebrity" institutions) are the result of
hyper-power. Concentration of capital (marxist understanding of
power) > imperial state. Information as capital, information has
imperial quality, it has no body, no geography, nothing to stop,
to prevent its expansion.
Urbanization was the biggest jump into the kingdom of slavery. If
"knowledge is power," how this power is used (Information Age):
another jump into total imprisonment. Our craving for slavery
produced civilization (belonging). Power is a myth (F.) --
nowadays power belongs to machine, I need an access to power
(position).
ARCHITECTURE OF PARADISE
Prison as a palace (banks). Soviet subway: glorious caves.
Paradise is nervous, hysterical place with all human (too human)
qualities, the world of angels. Price of comfort is the lost of
"natural" "freedoms." (I was free for nothing, according to
ideology. My freedom had no price). Comfort = slavery. (In fact,
I never was free; gravitation, body, etc.) In our new world the
phone defines me no less than my sex. Freedom isn't natural,
freedom is uncomfortable. Our environment (history = second
nature) includes apparatus of sexuality. The building. Doors,
windows, elevator, lights. Technology sexualized everything.
Human kind flirts with me, pornographic existence. Phone sex is
the only safe sex, an illusion of freedom is all I need (what is
sex anyway -- illusion?).
What is normal? Madness defines it. Welfare (public well being)
asks for NORMALIZATION (F). Democracy requires normality.
Paradise is very judgmental (remember the Judgement Day, it's
now, and it's 24 hours a day).
Next century (terrorism = madness, abnormal): an individual
(Raskolnikov, Unabomber) will launch his (personal) war on humanity. Try to defeat him. He is mortal; kamikaze has nothing to lose. How could you stop somebody who is mortal (dead)?
Mortality is immoral ("the last evil"). Dostoevsky.
Immortal human race has to pay the price for leaving me mortal.
Humanity? What is so human about that humanity?
Why shouldn't I get back at you, people? Who cares about me? Who
represents me? Me, not the "people, not that abstract man." Who
could? Communists (proletarian instinct) understood it (their own
past terrorism), and they went after the individual. They didn't
say "the end of man" -- they acted as if God was real dead.
ME: why not to give them hell of the fight, since I am here, and
because I won't be around forever?
Morality? Slum the door before you leave, you won't see them
again, you're sentenced to die already.
All became "la plebe" (commoners, folks, guys, common people).
"Each comrade3 becomes an observer." (152) Comradely of viewers:
spying on each other by watching all. Prevention (mental police)
moved the prison's concept into my daily life. Mates by default.
We can't praise enough wonders of slavery. Being watched is being
loved. Surveillance is a definition of attention. (We, the former
Soviet writers miss the KGB. Dostoevski came from Siberia a
reformed man. Notes from The Dead House).
NOTES OF A MADMAN
Madness: outlaw the single mind!
Terrorism is an expression of terror in a mind of existentialist.
Foucault: no respect for madness anymore. Not long ago it was a
mystery, now it's a disease. Silencing the single man. (That's
what power of the powerless does). Do we need the revolution of
madness (shamanism). White madness (positive, productive).
Repression of madness = stop thinking alone! (186) (Notes).
How do we punish for self-thinking? Self-censorship and self-punishment.
Divisions of mental labor. That's the wonder of enslavement. I
don't know how to fix my car, phone, computer. Lawyers, doctors,
you know, the professionals. The possessors of knowledge (truth?).
PRODUCTION OF DISTRACTION: ENTERTAINMENT
Prevention steps: underclass material.
Video violence: working fear and aggression (film v. movies).
Talk TV is forcing all to know them (people, non-hypers?). TV as
practical cultural studies (future-anthropology) in forms of
entertainment (invention of new culture).
PLAYMATES (US):
Entertainment = main means of communication (play). Dramatization
(experience) makes my knowledge emotional; stronger memory than
information.
We were asked to sympathize with the new generation (X?) (drugs,
gangs, etc.) as "the stressed up": fast life is too much for
peasants. (Human animals, Donahue). They can't handle the new
virtual (bodiless, spaceless) civilization. It would take a
special (total, constant) training to integrate human animals
(people) into PM.
Inner city; in the country they'd have to work to survive.
Teen pregnancies? We pay for mass reproduction. Human farming. Is
there a better form of production (material) of humanity? Freedom
to multiply: fulfillment of God's order-advice.
[Gangs? Lose everything. I remember myself at this age. The pack,
your group -- how else would you revolt against the institutions
of the power; the school, the family. Entering the Bently Mall in
Fairbanks, AK. on Sat. March 14, 1996]
All the structures destroyed (or the illusions?), they have no
purpose, and they don't read, as they never did.
[The school in NYC. Fenced, very high. Bars on windows. Everything is numbered. PS 167. Disciplined space. Gym, chemistry room, basketball court, cafeteria. An organization. Including time. Classes, breaks. Grouping. If you have a child, he must be lost already.]
There're children in paradise but no place for childhood. To
balance it everything moved into Disneyland (TV = main producer
of the toy values). It has to be stupid, in their world the
laughter must be canned.
GOOD NIGHT, AMERICA = GOOD BYE, AMERICA. Hello. Are you there?
Totalitarian state of popculture totality.
Mysteries of pop-culture. Radio and phone met.
Talk radio: rumoring. Reinsurance that I'm alive. News reaction
(creating the agenda).
Talk show host = personal culture of the talk show host. Night
people, alone.
Night show (confessional, public but with anonymity), both ways
(priest=host), sermon as a confession and an invitation to a
confession.
Sound and light: radio is sexy (voice, talk, female?)
VIRTUAL IMMORTALITY V. PHYSICAL INFINITY
Could dying be fun? What else but death makes life a fun place?
If I'm data, memory (ours) makes me immortal?
Continuity: after I'm gone, another generation of hardware
(wetware) could carl on my software. It was the same before but
the technology made it into (Universal, obligatory) Process.
Why is there such s fuss over dying? Why don't we complain about
being born? We missed the time before, didn't we? Why the time in
the future (fiction) has such importance for us?
Live as you're dead?
How do I live? How do I know that I'm alive? Because I eat, shit,
and still have a chance to die? Do I?
We don't vanish from life the way they did before. Tapes (audio &
video), photos, memos, records -- a life of an idiot, a criminal
is much more documented than the life of Shakespeare. Tolstoy had
to write novel after novel to be remembered; O.J. Simpson got
immortalized (?) by being a suspect in killing his ex-wife.
Nobody dies (as long as life is fully recordable?). That what
this recording does for us? We fight back the time (the tyrant)
we had invented. The war against time. The race against time --
story of my life. Mortality (time as space) is expressed by
everything around, since the timing is a main coordinate of our
living. Deadlines, including measured day and years. Not a time,
but the structured time. When you have to be "on time." We know
that nobody (almost nobody) would wait for us. The plane would
leave as if you are dead. Did I even missed the flight? Being in
a right place isn't enough.
Do we work? What is our work? Feeling? Primitive lived.
I fake it. "Performing" life...
Next -- extended life (twice as long).
Why, what for?
Follow me, said Jesus.
We did.
All right. In a position of Christ. Thanks.
Who said that God is free?
He is the biggest slave of all.
PART TWO. PARADISE REGAINED
Notes to "PARADISE AS GULAG" (Reading Foucault)
I. PASSION PLAY
1. "In image and likeness." Original life, which became a
foundation of the new virtual world, is based on senses -- pain,
pleasure, absence of pain and absence of pleasure. Resurrection
(humanization) emotionalizes the nature. If the primitives "read"
into nature their own nature, we produce (write in) our own
nature out of the "indifferent" matter.
Oh, the machine! My friend, my enemy! Why did we complain
about mechanization; the machine has to be linked with the dead
nature? Machines shouldn't be borne but made. A creation, on a
verge of becoming a creature. A hundred fifty horse power engine
is a violation of normality, it's mad nature under our control.
We make nature mad to control it. It has no life of its own, but
my life, human time. Car has no intellectual connection with
horse; instead of domestication, it was MADE, as my tool, a
mechanism of power. It belongs to us all (nature of
manufacturing) and can't be PRODUCED by myself alone. The engine
idea expresses our mutual desire, collective dream of power. In
car we are united. In technology we are agree. Technology is the
only ideology which surpasses any other super-idea. It's silent.
It doesn't need a propaganda because it got the powers of natural
laws.
2. Resurrection is a power play. Since it's a process, Time is a
basic material of resurrection. I (human) make a concept, an
abstract into "reality." Time doesn't exit outside "observer"
(human/s within history). Time Observed makes the process
"emotional" -- Paradise (product of resurrection) is a feeling, a
construct realized through technology. If architecture is a
frozen music, our second nature is a spiritual expression;
production (texts)...
3. Mother (nature) created men in singles. The Father, for
capitalization (concentration) purposes, has to have a bigger
coupons. A mass and masses. Men (not a man) were needed for
resurrection. In order to make them all interconnected,
exchangeable, etc. -- they have to be equalized (communism).
First, Christianity with its spiritual equality. Then the
technology (capitalism in forms of industrial revolution).
[Child-image: Father deconstructs Mother (nature) by growing
within and coming out to overpower her.]
4. The ancient man was taken apart; an individual became a
material for a member (literally) of the humanity (new man).
Third Adam became a subject of power. (Object-subject
dialectics). Mother nature is still present in me, but Father has
to control it, to transform it into "new" (pure) forms. My first
nature by definition became my crime (Christianity on sex). Since
my instincts are internal, Father has to extract them and work on
them before they become my behavior. Crime preventive policy
reverses "cause and effect" relations: punishment precedes the
crime. We call it "education."
II. Thought is an event. (Lenin on ideas and masses possessed by
ideas).
5. Feeling is a pre-thought. This is the real (angelic) reality.
From totalitarian power of view every my emotion is a state
business (God's concern, according to Christianity). Sin was a
crime for two thousand years (after it was announced that the
original sin is forgiven). The idea of the original sin is based
on premise that I'm vested in evil, a potential criminal
(ontological bad). Preventive punishment came from the Christian
concept of behavior (Stanislavsky system; psychological realism
-- from inside out). The fist "gaze" was of God's; the eye on
icons, on a dollar bill. Been seen and been watched.
"Discipline" may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a "physics" or an "anatomy" of power, a technology.[4]
6. "Discipline" of natural laws (physics, chemistry) is a system.
Mother-nature is "given," our initial circumstances,
Father-nature (conscience) has to create a system which should
include the first system within the techno-culture. Technology is
the most visible expression of power structure. "Thought police"
(PC, political correctness) was unavoidable. Russians communists
acted on the Christian church legacy; the censorship was
stretched from literature to mental institution for any
"different" thinking.
"And it may be taken over either by "specialized" institutions (the penitentiaries or "houses of correction" of the nineteenth century), or by institutions that use it as an essential instrument for a particular end (schools, hospitals), or by preexisting authorities that find in it a means of reinforcing or reorganizing their internal mechanisms of power (one day we should show how intrafamilial relations, essentially in the parents-children cell, have become "disciplined," absorbing since the classical age external schemata, first educational and military, then medical, psychiatric, psychological, which have made the family5 the privileged locus of emergence for the disciplinary question of the normal and the abnormal), or by apparatuses that have made discipline their principle of internal functioning (the disciplinarization of the administrative apparatus from the Napoleonic period), or finally by state apparatuses whose major, if not exclusive, function is to assure that discipline reigns over society as a whole (the police)."
7. Renaissance of slavery (N. America, Russia), the reappearance
of the serfdom (imperialism?), including "colonialism" were
carried well into the 20th century. American Taylorism and Soviet
Gulag and Hitler's concentration camps are the faces of
condensation of humanity. Our "vertical villages" (skyscrapers)
is nothing more than the military-labor barracks. Hyper-military
organization of labor has not only a productive purpose but a
disciplinary function; the natural limits of an individual body
have to be broken. There's nothing un-natural about our
un-natural conditions of living in urban environment. It has to
be a mass. We have to be overcrowded, over-socialized,
over-pressured, over-stressed, over-worked... That's the point.
This is the method.
"On the whole, therefore, one can speak of the formation of a disciplinary society in this movement that stretches from the enclosed disciplines, a sort of social "quarantine," to an
indefinitely generalizable mechanism of "panopticism." Not
because the disciplinary modality of power has replaced all the
others; but because it has infiltrated the others, sometimes
undermining them, but serving as an intermediary between them,
linking them together, extending them, and, above all, making it
possible to bring the effects of power to the most minute and
distant elements. It assures an infinitesimal distribution of the
power relations."
8. Every new wave of technological revolution (Trotsky's
permanent revolution) is another step into communalizing Third
Adam. (There's no difference between Adam and Eve in paradise).
The electronic revolution (Internet is the last invention) is
suppose to serve this process of totalization of OUR power over
us. It has to rule us with the same consistency as the natural
laws (nature). Every new techno-digit disciplines me. From a
toaster to a microwave, from a turntable to a cd player: the
complexity of technology makes my control (self-reaper, for one)
impossible. I sacrifice my understanding of "things" for a
comfort of usage. I'm further away from knowing how everything
works and deeper into dependence on others. I am surrounded with
things I didn't make and totally dependent on "guaranties" of the
product itself. My power in how-to-use it only. Conflicts of
powers expressed in so-called "throw away society"; everything
has to be replaced. The tech-revolution came to the speed when
the next generation of product ends the life of a product before
it falls apart. Cars, and now computers, renewed on a regular
cycle basis. I don't have even power of property because it loses
it value faster and faster. This is the end of private property
declared so long ago by the Communist manifesto. Paradise idea
rejected private property concept even before Marx.
III. DISCIPLINES AND DISCIPLINES (SCIENCE)
1. Science always was proud of being a disciplined knowledge. It
daughter "Technology" continued the ontological passion for
discipline principle. Mechanism is not supposed to have moods, it
would contradict my need for expression. A video camera carries
out my will and not its own. Technology multiplies my powers of
self-expression, magnifies my moods. It's a "borrowed" (rented)
powers. Technology religiously follows the three Foucault's
criteria of powering:
"The formation of the disciplinary society is connected with a number of broad historical processes economic, juridico-political, and, lastly, scientific of which it forms part.
1. Generally speaking, it might be said that the disciplines are techniques for assuring the ordering of human multiplicities. It is true that there is nothing exceptional or even characteristic in this: every system of power is presented with the same problem. But the peculiarity of the disciplines is that they try to define in relation to the multiplicities a tactics of power that fulfills three criteria: 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); 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; third, to link this "economic" growth of power with the output of the apparatuses (educational, military, industrial, or medical) within which it is exercised; in short, to increase both the docility and the utility of all the elements of the system."[6]
2. Resistance to the power of technology is very low (the lowest
possible cost). (Recent Unabomber's case shows that reaction to
the powers of technology is directed not against technology
itself by the people advancing it. We don't have any noticeable
revolt against our new ruler similar to the movement during the
industrial revolution in England). Second, power of technology is
almost invisible (the wisest ruler according to Lao Tze).
"Maximum intensity and totality" of technology is unquestionable;
technology is welcome and sought. The third point, "the docility
and the utility of all the elements of the system"; technology is
fully socialized and integrated.
3. Technology turns a mass into a public. Organizing the crowd is
a power process. Technology is a concentration of public
(production) essence.
"In this task of adjustment, discipline had to solve a number of problems for which the old economy of power was not sufficiently equipped. It could reduce the inefficiency of mass phenomena: reduce what, in a multiplicity, makes it much less manageable than a unity; reduce what is opposed to the use of each of its elements and of their sum; reduce everything that may counter the advantages of number. That is why discipline fixes; it arrests or regulates movements; it clears up confusion; it dissipates compact groupings of individuals wandering about the country in unpredictable ways; it establishes calculated distributions. It must also master all the forces that are formed from the very constitution of an organized multiplicity; it must neutralize the effects of counter-power that spring from them and which form a resistance to the power that wishes to dominate it: agitations, revolts, spontaneous organizations, coalitions anything that may establish horizontal conjunctions. Hence the fact that the disciplines use procedures of partitioning and verticality; that they introduce, between the different elements at the same level, as solid separations as possible, that they define compact hierarchical networks; in short, that they oppose to the intrinsic, adverse force of multiplicity the technique of the continuous, individualizing pyramid. They must also increase the particular utility of each element of the multiplicity, but by means that are the most rapid and the least costly, that is to say, by using the multiplicity itself as an instrument of this growth. Hence, it order to extract from bodies the maximum time and force, the use of those overall methods known as timetables, collective training, exercises, total and detailed surveillance."
4. ... Read on.
What are those "homepages"? For me it started in the Summer of 1998. Home? Castle? To defend myself? Our prinsons are the only landmarks of the past -- the walls, the gates. To defend the prisoners from us? The reversed purpose of centuries of architecture. Now in cyberspace! Each day I build more walls of my new "home" -- the labirynth to get lost. The castle of pages? I have to have another look at the anatomy of the good old fashion book...
"War and Peace" as an instrument of control? "Crime and Punishment" as a mechanism of self-discipline? My webpages as my Total War again the world? Military purpose?
...
"Knowledge is power?" We have to think about this statement again...
"Furthermore, the disciplines must increase the effect of utility proper to the multiplicities, so that each is made more useful than the simple sum of its elements: it is in order to increase the utilizable effects of the multiple that the disciplines define tactics of distribution; reciprocal adjustment of bodies, gestures, and rhythms; differentiation of capacities; reciprocal coordination in relation to apparatuses or tasks. Lastly, the disciplines have to bring into play the power relations, not above but inside the very texture of the multiplicity, as discreetly as possible, as well articulated on the other functions of these multiplicities and also in the least expensive way possible: to this correspond anonymous instruments of power, coextensive with the multiplicity that they regiment, such as hierarchical surveillance, continuous registration, perpetual assessment and classification. In short, to substitute for a power that is manifested through the brilliance of those who exercise it, a power that insidiously objectifies those on whom it is applied; to form a body of knowledge about these individuals, rather than to deploy the ostentatious signs of sovereignty. In a word, the disciplines are the ensemble of minute technical inventions that made it possible to increase the useful size of multiplicities by decreasing the inconveniences of the power which, in order to make them useful, must control them. A multiplicity, whether in a workshop or a nation, an army or a school, reaches the threshold of a discipline when the relation of the one to the other becomes favorable."
5.
[ Summer 2003. Read my notes on Virilio in POV; he takes on military nature of technology, where Foucault stops. Time for us to look at all our human relations from the war perspective; the old "one against all and all against everybody. We won't understand a thing about terrorism, unless we understand the facts of our progress, which includes the progress in means of aggression. Enough this stupid "War on Terror"! This existential terror is the rason why keep advancing our attack technologies, Internet or cars. And advance with the accelaration beyond our own comprehension, never mind, the rest of the world.
Every time you the spectacle of mart bombs, think about our "concentration" of fear behind those million-a-piece killing machines... ]
"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. 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. At a less general level, the technological mutations of the apparatus of production, the division of labor, and the elaboration of the disciplinary techniques sustained an ensemble of very close relations.' Each makes the other possible and necessary; each provides a model for the other. The disciplinary pyramid constituted the small cell of power within which the separation, coordination, and supervision of tasks were imposed and made efficient; and analytical partitioning of time, gestures, and bodily forces constituted an operational schema that could easily be transferred from the groups to be subjected to the mechanisms of production; the massive projection of military methods onto industrial organization was an example of this modeling of the division of labor following the model laid down by the schemata of power. But, on the other hand, the technical analysis of the process of production, its "mechanical" breaking-down, was projected onto the labor force, whose task it was to implement it: the constitution of those disciplinary machines in which the individual forces that they bring together are composed into a whole and therefore increased is the effect of this projection. Let us say that discipline is the unitary technique by which the body is reduced as a "political" force at the least cost and maximized as a useful force. The growth of a capitalist economy gave rise to the specific modality of disciplinary power, whose general formulas, techniques of submitting forces and bodies, in short, "political anatomy," could be operated in the most diverse political regimes, apparatuses, or institutions."
6.
[ "The computer revolution"... Don't we know that every revolution is blood and death! Do you see the victums of our invisible revolution? Who told you that there is no price to pay for your new monitor? Do you know how we pay for a new generation of "Windows"? You see it everywhere -- the celebration of the catastrophy -- the cellular phones. What do you see? Don't you understand that now we can be reached anywhere anytime? No need for physical concentration -- city, prison, labor camps! We desire to be inprisoned, we pay for our slavery... Oh, no, I am not agaisnt, I simply want you to know "the price of freedom," as they say. Yeah, yeah, the price of freedom and the total prison -- you... ]
"2. The panoptic modality of power at the elementary, technical, merely physical level at which it is situated is not under the immediate dependence or a direct extension of the great juridico-political structures of a society; it is nonetheless not absolutely independent. Historically, the process by which the bourgeoisie became, in the course of the eighteenth century, the politically dominant class was masked by the establishment of an explicit, coded, and formally egalitarian juridical framework, made possible by the organization of a parliamentary, representative regime. But the development and generalization of disciplinary mechanisms constituted the other, dark side of these processes. 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. 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."
7. According to St. Paul the law is the roots of a sin. We
have to overcome any written law. Our laws must become our
nature. That was the promised leap "from the kingdom of necessity
into the kingdom of freedom." (Marx) Technology is a
self-negation of law and legal society (contractual arrangements)
should be in a natural conflict with its technology drive.
"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. They have the precise role of introducing
insuperable asymmetries and excluding reciprocities. 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. 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 "counterlaw." And, although the universal
juridicism of modern society seems to fix limits on the exercise
of power, 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. 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."
Since the technology is a super social power, "private" connections (Internet, a phone, in general) include capsulated public powers. Asymmetry of power?
8. "The class domination" should be understood as the rule of
majority?
9. Is zoo a prison? Are limitations of freedom rewarding? Is
punishment beneficial for the punished? Those Kafkian questions
are legitimate in PM situation. The Soviets know that all horrors
of Stalin's time were out of best intentions. The Holy Inquision
saw a burning of a sinner as a mercy act (separation his soul
from his corrupted body). Our entire notion of education based on
this paradox. Discipline performs according to a formula: guilty
till proven innocent.
"To return to the problem of legal punishments, the prison with all the corrective technology at its disposal is to be resituated at the point where the codified power to punish turns into a disciplinary power to observe; at the point where the universal punishments of the law are applied selectively to certain individuals and always the same ones; at the point where the redefinition of the juridical subject by the penalty becomes a useful training of the criminal; at the point where the law is inverted and passes outside itself, and where the counterlaw becomes the effective and institutionalized content of the juridical forms. 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...."[7]
10. PERSONAL TAKE
1. The bottom line of all my speculations on power distribution
in techno-culture has one simple reason -- my powers. The obvious
is discussed in length. The question is do I gain my own
(non-lender) powers or the whole process is a final and
irreversible lost? How do new disciplines effect my will space.
My personal experience is ready to say that "pleasures in
paradise = not to be punished." That's the reward...
2. Sense of Paradise: fear. Thought-feeling of Horror is a ruling
idea (nothing new, God's description in the Bible). Obviously,
POWER OF FEELINGS rules techno-culture. Desires, expectations,
hopes, etc. Power is a feeling: feeling = power. See .
Terrorism: each of us could end the life of human race? Why the
extreme? Why only the destruction? All or nothing. There's no
fixed system of titles, only job descriptions (not characters).
Anything personal shall be removed from the performance.
3. Nature of resurrection is extremely emotional, it's
hyper-human, too human, almost mechanical... I go deeper inside
myself to the last frontier of non-civilized human territories. I
and Me travel together and the "I" with the "Me" brings in the
whole civilization. I have to go in to leave the kingdom of
technology, to retain the balance of powers between private and
public.
4. Critical or cynical? Pessimistic, tragic? Where this reaction
to Foucault or Baudrillard comes from? Is the knowledge of
gravity too depressing? What is any science about if not to tell
me about the absolute power of this or that law? Knowledge is
only a message of the real. Nature, including our man-made world,
is radical. What about the totalitarism of astronomy, or biology?
The tyranny of my blood circulation or chemical reactions in my
stomach? Why do we expect that our "system" would not strive for
a similar totality? Aren't we upset with not working mechanisms?
What do you expect from centuries of evolution and six billion
humans. Of course, we crosses the borders of an individual,
didn't he asked for it? We producing this individuality -- and I
think we (they) have no rights to enter it? What a strange
concept of "human rights" or "individual freedom." You can't be
serious. This bill of rights is an indication that those rights
are created, not discovered (far from bering "inheritable"), and
they need to be guarded because THEY ARE NOT NATURAL. Democracy
is abnormal formation, something opposite to anything natural
(nature), as life is an abnormality, an accident of the space.
Are you still surprised that Saadam Hussein is in power? You
better be surprise that we have no public executions in America.
Why do we use this word "progress" if not as a silent admission
of abnormality of everything we do? You know what is normal?
Nothing, decomposition, dead, no power -- that's normal.
Depressing?
Now you understand why we are stupid, we don't want to be
depressed. We need to lie to ourselves -- this is our ideology.
We have to shoot ourselves down, if we could. That's why the
future of entertainment is so bright. The more we would learn
about ourselves, more we would need to cover the real. We are
moving into total mindless world, we have to make individuals
into functional idiots. We have to handicap their ability to
understand, but in a right, special way. In short, we need
education. Just imagine Plato or Kant present -- do we really
need their power of mind? God forbid! We don't know how to
swallow and digest the changes that fall on us every day. We need
limited minds. It's better to have politicians like Clinton and
Dole without character or vision, than to have driven by his
convictions Hitler or Lenin. The corrupt, bureaucratic mind is
predictable, like a car. Or would you like your car to have its
own "creativity"? We need an individual who is good for all of
us. We need to install the limitations (breaks) on his
individuality, to make his mind half-open, finished structure.
That is what general-public-free-education is about. Why would we
pay for anything else?
Futurism and euphoria of anticipated future wasn't a mass
product, but those uncontrolled individuals, the avant guard of
humanity which has to be forced into the underground. The general
love of the future in modernity was more of presentism.
Postmodern reaction to modernity, realized utopia is more
"normal" -- we better be conservatives when we deal with unknown,
on the extreme of the unknown -- our own future. Hey, slow down,
easy! This rough sex with time could be dangerous. This popular
motto on our walls -- fuck -- is an indication that we would like
to fuck the world because we feel fucked up.
Did we reach the limits of our abilities to accept the
humanity? Does the being humans gets on our nerves to the point
that we can't take it anymore? We should know that resurrection
is very stressful process. Judging by the triumph of American
Age, we are in a rush to develop a safety mechanism against the
mind. Until there will be no more birth and mortal life (only
creations), we have to use mental censoring to have safe
resurrection.
Something I didn't mention in Unabomber story, the thought which crossed my mind, when I was writing pages about this quiet American. He got life. But what did he have before? What do I have? Behind the computer screen is the window into Alaskan white nights. I see the great skies, which were above before me and will be there after. The strange light resting in clouds and the montains below as giant sleeping animals. ...And I turn back to the screen -- to see if did spell right the words you are reading.
How to live in prison -- Prison for Prisoners: feel at home!
Self-improvement, education; they didn't get enough schooling.
American
Film-North * Anatoly Antohin
