Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Equalizer

The gun is the great equalizer; All are equal before God; God is a gun.

And you ask yourself, how is it that men that want to jump back to another age, when things were in their infancy, shoot guns so fluidly. How can an identity of piety be absolutely fused with the AK-47 and its crescent trigger.

It is a case of false consciousness.

The relationship to technology is indelible, unavoidable. There is no greater post-modern actor than the religious zealot. There would be no Al Qaeda without the Internet for its networking and fomenting; there would be no identity without the hyperbolic, media-myth-making in the hyper-reality of the news. These Muslims want to do away with it. The flabbiness and decadence of the Western modern world, but they fail to see the irony that their very identities, all the symbols, all the knowledge and forms of communication are absolutely dependent upon the decadence of the West.

The guns they tote, the cellphones, Internet forums and the use of the media to give their terrorist activities meaning. Even the suicide bomber is motivated more by the notion of celebrity-hood, in the terms of the inflated sense of the individual by the hyper-reality of the media, than by a true notion of self-debasement before God. The very experience of committing the act of suicide for religious reasons is informed by the knowledge and fabrications of the Western world's news sources, that slowly trickle out into these Muslim nations. They comprehend their fate by those that have gone before them, and those that have gone before them are silent, shattered bodies that are given a false voice of meaning by news agencies.

Al Qaeda is nothing without the AK-47; they have no meaning without the threat of the equalizing force of technology. Technology continues to develop and allow for levels of freedom ineffable. That a clandestine force can exist across the world through the flow of tiny, clicking sinews of bits. That a few bands of men can possess arms that make them a threat to nations, to civilizations. And they speak about the ineffable and the ever-presence of God in a book, but they are composed by the ever-presence of the ineffable freedom of creeping technology.

Sunday, June 5, 2011

Truth As Sinew

The strain to understand and to enter into truth and reality hangs as heavy as the weight of our very bodies. These truths maintain themselves in our lives as moral imperatives, as indelible narratives for which all utterances imply, lead back. But what is so scientific, so honest and objective about our deepest moral, cultural and emotional needs. Historically we have always needed a truth more than we have ever possessed truth, entering into the tragic and humorous hindsight of human, fragmentary "progression." Look to the harbingers of truth, the formulations of social bodies to professionally deal with knowledge, and the efficacy of their modern day institutions.

At one point, take up the domain of the human mind and its many emotions, the irrefutable truth of the etiology of malformation in the psyche was the excess and deficiency of humors (i.e. fluids) in the body. Now we talk about such world views riddled with snickers at the expense of the Ancient Greeks. The snickers ring with a certain subconscious self-doubt because the history of the eventual development of the science psychology is as needful of careful editing and dismissal as Church history. Each historical period enters into a radically different world view, an ideology that distinguishes itself from a previous period; this is the stuttering, stop-starting of historical force that allows for a history, where a fluid progression would be impossible if history is to be a real, evocative force. Fundamental contradiction is the historical norm in nearly all science, where for example Newtonian physics and the Theory of Relativity absolutely tear asunder, creating two isolated, historically disparate ideologies. These are not born from each other, but rather, like the neuroscience of psychology today and its Freudian libidinal theory precursor, one ideology becomes inert while another ideology is suddenly, without warning blooming, unfurling the gears of a history.

Each ideology looks back with a wrongheaded notion that it is in some way indebted or related to what came before them, and that it is somehow greater or the torch-bearer of something that came before. Each new ideology thinks itself to be finally at the gates of truth, and it is a foolish Christian sentiment. Each ideology is in the end times, in the time of some great revelation, where the true essence of things has finally arrived and with it the end of history. Yet, this meta-historical narrative continues to repeat itself as one giant, endlessly-toothed gear. We look back and ask how they had possibly gotten it so wrong, and how they had been so far from the truth. While self-assured, we wait in the end times, finally steps away from the truth. But we never once ask, that perhaps there was no truth before us that we had built on, and our new formulating truths are of a nature nothing like what we conceive of in the notion of a historical progression. Truth seems to serve towards the totality of the ideology, the sinew that brings together the senseless, formless nonsense of everything into a meaningful reality. We need the truth to comprehend before we even arrive at the possibility for truth. Truth resides like a blade in the hand, not as a shimmering mirage on the edge of our quiet desert; and blades can lie in their indiscrimnate cutting, the furried pace of blood-gorged fingers. Might lies be primary to allow for a cobweb of intricatly connected truths? And when that first lie, or truth as you might call it, dies as it always does, what new lie must be thrust back into the gullet of the transgression to start the game of ideology and truth all again.

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Power and Rights

First feelings of power, of volition are the replications of initial, external power that submit us. A child is scolded for wetting his or her pants; the paternal force disciplines the child. The child then soon enters into this force, appropriates it and in delusion believes when he restrains his own body, he is doing it by his free volition. The first feelings of power, the emergence of the free self, is the exercising of control and power external to ourselves.

From this base, psychological condition of humanity, larger structures of political and social construction occur. Democracy and liberalism, understood in a broad sense, is the appropriation of power that submit disenfranchised groups. What are the pillars of democracy and liberalism? Universalized human rights, the notion of a common good stemming from the construction of a concept of humanity -- of what a human is and therefore needs. Looking carefully and anthropologically, it is apparent that the creation of the human idea is an act of separation, isolation and justification. The Ancient Greek's believed that only men, of particular greek families had status as humans, and every person outside of that restrictive, elite group were sub-human, something more akin to animals in their availability for use; humans have a right on a ground of superiority to exert force and dominion over groups outside of themselves.

In subordination, these subhuman groups enter into numerous psychological complexes. One of them being their inability to assert their force, robbed of an identity, a position in society that allows for the expulsion of bodily and mental force. At times, their resentment and anger turn inward, escaping from the world, giving rise to metaphysics, to a new world of insubordination that can be turned on their one of powerlessness. This is the birth of Abrahamic religions with its clear and hidden progeny. At times, being unable to assert their power, they appropriate power, but power as defined in terms of the elite group's notion of what is human and what humans have rights to. This is the paradoxical universalization of human rights. How can there be an encompassing of all into the one notion of what is human which is defined by elites to distinguish themselves from the subhuman and give them the right over all people? This is the birth of liberalism and democracy. The initial power held over subordinate groups is appropriated, but ironically, the robbing of the elitist notion of humanity allows for the preservation of that power permanately, outside of the hands of its creators, floating between people in senseless self-discipline.

Western formations of government and religion are both born of powerlessness, resentment and revenge; their subterranean texts fester, where the bubbling up of these hidden words and feelings results in an obsessive need to association these institutions as harbingers of freedoms.

Sunday, January 30, 2011

What We Do

But we are omnivores! Yet so is the dog an omnivore, and you -- an ardent and steadfast dog! What of these spirits that seeks the most base for definition? But we are humans(?) and by what distinction? Not in our shared baseness of animality, but humanity is birthed in relation to godliness, to divinity. But we are omnivores? But we are gods! -- of unending restraint and justice.

Saturday, January 8, 2011

Bodies

When I walk around the marketplace, I find it to be the greatest call to have children. As this brain sharpens, my mind bears witness, the cloth of presence is torn open to reveal truly the unbearable. I look out into the marketplace, and I realize how tremendous the psychosis of humanity is. To have children would be the most selfish act, to force any being to live in the age of unspeakable spiritual decay where carcinogenic poison and idolatrous fetishism for buzzing plastics has replaced all sustenance and the exemplar of a god would be immoral.

But the birth of a child even in the asphyxiating web of pointless wires is one of the last acts of beauty humanity is capable of doing; there are moments where beauty must usurp morality, as we would allow thousands to die to save a beloved or kill ourselves in the name of an ideal. It is the last act, the last engagement with the transcendence of the uncovering of the other, the you; from such a baseness, such primordial energies something truly presuppositionless and wonderful can come -- you. And it shits on the Church of progression that is really a church of death that annihilates the vitality of the body while pointing to the specious grace of its omnipotence of rotten grain and omniscience of mass media.

I hear it. How can you throw it all out? Look at our ability to accumulate knowledge, to transmit such a knowledge, and from this knowledge, manipulate and construct reality toward a more ideal environment for humanity; is this not all progress and is it not good?

Knowledge serves the purpose of action in a world. All knowledge finds itself as a blueprint for power, for energy in a subject to unveil itself like a splintering lightning strike. True, the knowledge acquired through technological advancements has allowed for an unprecedented celerity in growth. Decade after decade computer capabilities explode with new potentials, the genetic structures of things are being mapped and beginning to be manipulated. The sciences root deeper than ever before and have seemingly near-atomistic structures to work with. But growth cannot be confused with progress; the growth witnessed in our time reflects the new body of humanity -- the polluted body.

Technology, fragmented scientific knowledge, the biologists, the physicists, the chemists, the psychiatrists are growing in numbers and societal significance at an astonishing rate, and many believe that this is reflective of their usefulness to humanity and the inevitability of the progress and success of Western thought. The growth is not progress, however, but rather, a cancerous tumor that is draining and exhausting the vital energies of society. Genetically modified food has the potential to cause significant damage to the human body, especially in the manipulation of food items natural formulation, depriving them of all necessary nutrients that sustains the human body. The modern body is tainted with the specter of sustenance. The exhaust, runoff and noise pollution of the carousel gears of modern industry increases the prevalence of asthma, destroys the immune system, causes you to ingest toxins and poisons in the drinking water and air. The modern body is alive, burning with the latent tumors ringing out to the carcinogens that float like an apocalyptic dander through everything. Consider the parallels of the limited notion of cancer in the biological view: a cancerous cell turns on the body, begins to grow off the resources of the host, and then sends out cancerous cells through the blood stream that can cause malignancy. Everywhere there is pollution, and this pollution is growing at an alarming rate. Our bodies are riddled with hundreds of man-made substances from the sole act of existing -- is that not metaphysically significant!?

The sinuous, knotty, gnarled mass of industry sits somehow inconspicuously as part of this world, breathing a death we know we are all connected to. Progress? Knowledge? A cancerous cell's genes are a form of information, and it is a basic type of knowledge from which like a lighting strike, a tumor can unveil itself.

If it were progress, we could say most definitely, as claimed earlier that a depth and breadth of knowledge is increasing. But, let us return to the idea that knowledge is only knowledge in its ability to allow a subject to act in a world. The knowledge that would be most vital to us is a knowledge that would allow us to act in this world, this given reality. One could have an extensive knowledge that allows them to act, but if this knowledge is divergent from the world one wishes to act in, that knowledge would be illusory. The question needs to be asked, is the knowledge that technology, the harbingers of a supposed progress, of the fragmented sciences and its new mass media, a knowledge that allows for true action in this world? It absolutely is not. These aspects of our society are cancerous growths that have leeched our strength to act in this reality. They contain knowledge, but a knowledge like the cancer cell's genes that allows for a dual world to be created that absorbs the first. What aspect of industrialized agriculture has allowed humanity to act beyond what they were originally capable of doing? Industry's endless pollution? The ever shrinking, broken worlds of rigorous science that can do nothing but obsesses over fabricated points in their cartography and can give the average man nothing from which to act upon, to move towards.

Humanity has never been fatter, weaker and more culturally insignificant than it is today. Morbid obesity is not just a societal issue, the failing of a State's health departments, individual laziness or some other provincial view of the matter at hand. Morbid obesity is an absolute metaphysical crisis. Humanity finds itself less and less in this world as its body is robbed of its physical meaning and capabilities it begins to crumble and disintegrate. More and more technology and science are becoming insular worlds where the knowledge derived from such tasks serves the purpose of the technology itself rather than action in the real world. News is more about news than reality, the internet becomes more about the internet than anything else. Reality television presents an artifice of the real world that is actually just the appropriation of the real world by television. For anything to claim knowledge and thus progress it has to give a subject an enhanced ability to act in the world; being that the human body is the original, primary and presuppositionless way for humanity to exist in the real, material world, anything that degrades the body and reduces the body's ability to act in the world is not a thing of knowledge and not a thing of progress.

And as the creatures who were once humans ontologically deconstruct with their bulbous, functionless bodies breathing in tune with their personalized pieces of industry, slowing melting into, being absorbed by and giving birth to the lecherous tumors of technology producing a culture of buffalo wings and ranch dressing, I will mediate upon the body. The real world waits in the form of knowledge only available to the body, the most primary mode of being in the world. Only by the most base acts of our body do we engage in the truest aspects of the purest world that birthed the ontology of the human body; for a little while, though our bodies are still polluted some form of health arrives to us when we are mindful in our breathing, our eating, our fucking and our shitting; we are in the world. And faintly the bleeding in of other bodies in touch and presence arrive to us, and we find the transcendence of the you -- the child, the lover, the friend -- that remains so far beyond the insular sciences and the dissecting technology of a cancerous growth.