I locate the "End of History" in the 1980s. After that came only the Internet and that was it. The last big thing was 1968. Culturally, spiritually, intellectually. This was the last great event on this planet. So I would like to discuss this subject, along with the leftist egalitarianism and whatever else that signified this Era or followed after it. The "Love&Peace" time the "Hippie Era", "Sex, Drugs and Rock'n'Roll". Whatever label you want to put on it. Also the the more militant radical leftist groups.
We had political movements, demonstrations against the vietnam war, the rights for women and blacks movements.
Our parents and teachers were influenced by this Era. Everyone. So that's why I think it's important and I will play the advocatus diaboli, since I sense some right-wing leaning in this forum. I haven't read very much Marx, but growing up in Germany all my influences up until recently have been leftist or non-political. The furthest to the right I have read up until a year ago was Nietzsche. And he is well accepted here amongst the humanist masses. Only recently have I looked into other right-wing writers, that are legal over here.
I claim that the 1968ers (as they are called in Germany) made heavy spiritual experiences. The problem was that they were not ritually grounded. They had no culture with their drug experiences for example. They were angry and took LSD, which gave them bad trips. So they overdid it.
In Germany there was this one slogan: "Unter den Talaren der Muff von 1000 Jahren." Which is a reference that the young generation was unhappy here, that many Nazi collaborators got away too easily and were their teachers still. They wanted to change that. Start a new.
I think todays Left romantacize 1968 and the right-wing pretends like it didn't happen. But IT HAPPENED! And it was BIG! And what it was exactly, I don't know. But to dismiss it, is a fault. Todays news compared to the moon landing! JFK was assasinated. So you can say anything you wish about this time, but it wasn't boring. People travelled to India and seeked enlightenment. I say: if we want to understand our present situation we can either go back as far as ancient greece or the enlightenment era, but to understand modernity we have to understand 1968. The 20th Century with it's 2 WorldWars. The Generations conflicts. (Grandparents, Parents, Children, Childrens children...)Why young and old don't understand each other. Because each Generation has their own spirit. I want to move past 1968. But I think we are stuck with the aftermath of 1968, because we haven't looked at it precisely enough. It's become a phenomenon of pop-culture. It's become nostalgia. Something light and easy. But that was exactly NOT the case, from the knowledge I got by now. It was rough, people were struggling with their existence. And they risked adventures. And why did they turn so conservative afterwards, in the 80's at the lastest in most cases!? Why didn't they keep up their hippie lifestyles? Who were the leaders? And who the followers?
1968? All social engeneering? What about that drug LSD? Was it the only cause for all of 1968 and the following democratic leftism? What I witness is that these people with all their revolutionary anger and energy later became docile conservative automatons. Was 1968 a desaster? Or did something good come of it? Was there something "natural" about it? Something that needed to happen for humanity to evolve!? What is a right-wing view on 1968? A political (non-conspiracy theorist) right-wing view?
Last edited by Laconian on Tue Jan 15, 2013 4:56 am; edited 1 time in total
perpetualburn
Gender : Posts : 955 Join date : 2013-01-04 Location : MA
It was rough, people were struggling with their existence. And they risked adventures. And why did they turn so conservative afterwards, in the 80's at the lastest in most cases!? Why didn't they keep up their hippie lifestyles? Who were the leaders? And who the followers?
For one, the "hippie lifestyle" is a retreat from engaging the real world. Pychadelics can never bring real wisdom... I've done psychedelics many times before and I always came to the same conclusion after every trip... that I didn't need to do psychedelics and that sobriety is necessary. Beautiful visions(on drugs) and beautiful dreams for that matter, only serve as a means for inspiration for a sober state where you can organize and build yourself around that inspiration... If you're not sober, your mind is going to be clouded, you waste valuable time, and maybe most importantly, you need to be sober to get the most out of feminine energy( the most intoxicating thing is women, and if you're not sober and healthy, you're not going to get the most from her(you're going to have less energy to re-direct/sublimate)... No one engaged and understood the feminine as well as Nietzsche, IMO...who remarked that even drinking one glass of wine could ruin his whole day.
Anyways, the hippie era was one of laziness on one hand ( rock and roll, drugs, sex and fun all justified under some superficial philosophy of personal freedom...all very effeminate (letting the "experience" take you over...something that women love to do and feel a personal feeling of power in), and, on the other hand, the more hardcore leftists( the people going to India or setting up hippie communities), who seem to be doing something more active and organized, but are ultimately still trying to escape this world.... and of course, those militant leftists groups were a joke.
Oh, BTW, David Duke is a joke ( I'm sure you know that)... He simply plays to the Jewish conspiracy crowd as a way to market and sell himself... He also censors his youtube comment section... just like that site Stormfront censors the hell out of its forum...
The leftist movements of the 1960s were basically movements of resentment against 'power structures.' Loosely based around the idea that authority itself is a bad thing. The repercussions can be felt today in disrespect for parents, teachers, police, ancestry etc. Today, it's the 'trendy' thing to rebel against authority. Non-Western countries do not have this problem; there is, mostly, a healthy respect for authority.
I disagree slightly that the rebels of the 1960s became conservative. The halls of academia, the public service, and trade unions is where they rest today. All, mostly, preach the same thing: love of the 'other' and a disrespect of one's own.
I disagree slightly that the rebels of the 1960s became conservative.
I think "bourgeois" was the term I was originally looking for.
______________
I kind of got the label "leftist" on here. So i want to show that both sides of the politcal sprectrum are actually parodies of themselves. The Left and the Right and that we need to move beyond. I read counter-currents publishing, as a right-leaning resource site, just as there were great left-leaning intellectuals out their. (But they're both restricted.) I hope this forum can built on both, towards something more natural, more sincere, less restricted. Watching 1968 documantaries, I cannot take sides. I don't know which side I would have been on. If I wouldn't have been one of the (leftist) protesters. They had a point against the vietnam war. And even womens lib had some value probably. Why I posted the particular vid on Freud is an addition to the "Century of the Self" documentary, that is posted elsewhere here. Freud to me personally is the most controversial figure. I love him and I hate him. His mimetic influence was profound. I post this topic as a challenge. My fight is towards a greater understanding of the past that shaped me (us). Because 1968 was the year that shaped a generation. In this case mostly my parents. So this is my personal agenda behind this, I would like to understand my parents better.
No one engaged and understood the feminine as well as Nietzsche, IMO...who remarked that even drinking one glass of wine could ruin his whole day.
I agree with all of your posting, except this. I am a native German Speaker, living in German. I have studied Nietzsche. Read his diaries. I have heard radio shows on him, scholars talk about him on tv and youtube. Friends who read him. So trust me to be an "expert". Nietzsche has his limits. Read Sloterdijk on him. Or Rüdiger Safranski. His "Zarathustra" still stands for me as a light. A warning of the decline of civilisation. The eventual complete collapse. But Nietzsche is also the most misinterpreted. He can be used for all kinds of purposes.
It's based on a book by Michel Houellebecq. Who calls or called himself a Nihilist. I read his first two novels (this one included), which were very popular in Germany.
Tried to watch "Fight Club" the other day. But shut it off once Tyler gets involved with that Marla chick. I cannot relate. Enjoyed the movie years ago. Watched it 2-3 times. But it's just the first part that includes all the "cult" quotes. The movie goes downhill, after 30 minutes or so. I found it unbearable from that point on. But within these first minutes it hits some quite important points. Comfort, false security. False identification. Materialist greed.
apaosha Daeva
Gender : Posts : 1847 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 37 Location : Ireland
A friend of mine watched Fight Club with me once. I remember he was especially disturbed by the vivid fight scenes. I remember in particular that he had to walk out during the scene where the narrator is peeping on Tyler and the girl.
Perhaps you can explain that for me.
_________________ "I do not exhort you to work but to battle; I do not exhort you to peace but to victory. May your work be a battle; may your peace be a victory." -TSZ
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37119 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
He's borderline asexual. Very nerdy. I assumed the sexuality of that scene made him even more uncomfortable than the violence in the other scenes.
_________________ "I do not exhort you to work but to battle; I do not exhort you to peace but to victory. May your work be a battle; may your peace be a victory." -TSZ
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37119 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
He's borderline asexual. Very nerdy. I assumed the sexuality of that scene made him even more uncomfortable than the violence in the other scenes.
Yes...like finding a worm in your apple, when all you've experienced are these pristine, glossy ones. A slight glimpse of animal behavior, produced by humans.
The character in the movie (Brad Pitt) is the more primal part of the shcizophrenic tie and suit guy.
A friend of mine watched Fight Club with me once. I remember he was especially disturbed by the vivid fight scenes. I remember in particular that he had to walk out during the scene where the narrator is peeping on Tyler and the girl.
Perhaps you can explain that for me.
Like you say: borderline asexual. Or even closet homosexual. Confused. Metrosexual. Very common today.
The violence part is of course also what the largest part of todays Left rejects vehemently. (As the Right, too probably.)
In the US violence on screen is widely accepted, whereas even sexual language is banned. In Europe there is more skin shown on TV even.
In the movie they want to reach the starting point again. Start over again on a primal level, before culture and civilization.
This here is in my opinion the most memorable quote from the movie (and it occurs in the later part, I must admit:)
Quote :
“In the world I see you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rock feller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Towers. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying stripes of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighways.”
In the above Quote from Fight Club, you see the delusion. It is a form of romanticism. This primal level includes a view of nature: where man is predator and the animals his prey. It does not include however the view of man vs. man. So it is a form of carnivore romanticism that is promoted here. It is not proper bottom-up thinking, no reasonably predicted future either. It is a fanatasy, that is detached from reality. Tyler Durden doesn't know man's nature. He is indoctrinated by the 1968 New Age-ism. The Love, Peace and Harmony, all are equal collective halluzination.
To me the Fight Club itself represents repressed aggressions, that lie under the surface of modernity and that wish to come out somehow. A place where men can at least be men in their primal form. The movie excludes women completely, (only Marla, who is representing the poor (class) and not the female archetyp). The emasculation not only in the work force (service jobs), but also the lack of appreciation in their homes with their wives and families or the lack of those.
It is an important movie in my opinion, but it's idealism is a form of detached romanticism. It's 14 years old and things have gotten worse from back when the movie was made. The movie if anything increased the chaos and resentment. It has a low ideal of what man is. (The "all singing and dancing scum of the world".) It's philosophy is more modern buddhist, than Nietzschean. It's anti-market. It's anti in so many ways. But not pro very much. "Near life experience" is another notable quote. Excessive states of pleasure. Pleasure through pain (masochism). It's plutonian. It's worldview is hedonist. Like with the guy he threatened with a gun to tell him his dreams. "He will have the best day of his life tomorrow. And his breakfast will taste better than anything you and I tasted before..." A pure hedonist view on life. Re-actionary. Not R-evolutionary. There is no Evolution in this movie (even if he claims it).
Revolt, but no R-evolution. The blowing up of the financial buildings in the end is but a symbol of chaos. No new beginning. Therefor the act is too small. It's a vision by men and for men, that's why a lot of boys, who want to be strong men obsess about the movie. It's an MGTOW movie. Men going their own way. It's a homosexual movie. The only woman (Marla) is but a suicidal groupie and a f-ktoy to Tyler. In love with his primal masculinity. Something the ego-shooters MRA's can relate to. The porn addicts. Nothing noble. No intellect. Just big balls and muscles like their hero's egos on screen.
But maybe we were in the phase of revolt. Or are still in it. A r-evolution, would need minds coming together. Not mindless robots like in that movie, with their Führer Tyler Durden. It would need creative thinking. Teamwork. Also acceptance and respect for the other, not like in the military camp in the movie.
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
"At first one thought that political correctness (PC) was but an absurd, and collection of kitsch euphemisms patched together in order to cover, in the manner of fig leaves, the obscenities of contemporary America: her barbarism and racism. We know the story: Mrs. and Miss turned into Ms., gal became lady, colored people minorities, guy gentleman, blacks African-Americans, fat heavy (or big), Spics Latinos (or Hispanic- Americans), skinny slender, Wops Italian-Americans, Third World countries developing countries, Orientals Asians, short petite, et cetera. This was yet the folk aspect of the change. Initially—in the early eighties—all this sounded ludicrous, but one might have granted the benefit of the doubt to the whole effort and inferred therefrom that PC was but the expression of a movement that sought, in spite of all, to correct the errors and hatreds of the past by starting with the words themselves, with speech. Soon it became clear that the shift was never meant to go further. It was rhetoric all right; some kind of manneristic foreplay to the habitual doublespeak of the “Liberal democracies,” which, in their ploys of international conquest and social imbalances, always come to justify imperial intrigue in the name of “freedom” and “human rights” on the one hand, and to blame economic inequality on “culture,” on the other.
So PC turned out to be an argot that the middle class developed to mask its failure. Its failure to democratize the country; to overcome its deep-seated loathing of all those ethnic groups that have shown themselves “unfit” in point of technological and business proficiency; to tolerate the sight of misery and distress with a view to allaying them; and to alleviate indigence . . . In short, as they were incapable of “spreading the sunshine,” and as they were despairing because of this failure, the intelligentsia and the people thought it was better to lie to themselves chronically, and so, like hackers, they cheated; they broke into the network of daily parlance and altered the data, they doctored the words. Words whose outspoken brutality was itself the suggestion of where the problems had to be tackled.
But there was no afterthought; in time, things evolved. Not only had ordinary language become falsified, and the intellectual possibility of dissent enfeebled as a consequence, but one came to find that this semi-improvised linguistic patch-work had gradually assumed the proportions of a system. In schools it became fashionable to hear that “truth” was an elusive concept, and therefore that the notion of “immutable values,” by which one might rank human achievements (and crimes), was not only wrong but heinous to boot, given its implicit injunction to discriminate, subjugate, and eventually destroy all that had been classified as “inferior.” According to this sprouting creed, the culprit of all that was abominable was the middle-aged white male of European descent: admittedly the greatest classifier and butcher in the history of mankind. This was hardly a new or controversial conclusion; what was different, however, was the peculiar logic leading to it.
So-called truths, one heard, formed just a tangle of discourses—discourses ever changing, the one hardly “truer” than the other, all of them manifestations of evolving power relations. This sounded suspiciously similar to a Marxian argument, but it wasn’t, for, listening on, one discovered that the human expression of reality as a whole was but a fabric of discourses, some (the dominant ones) more preponderant, others (the marginalized ones) less so. The novelty was that whole new categories of “displaced subjects”—the oppressed ones—were now launched on the field of analysis and endowed with discourses of their own, which, as it was forcefully conveyed, happened to be no less (if not a great deal more) noble, legitimate, and truthful than the discourse of the Eurocentric whites.
At first sight this appeared to be a compassionate move to give a voice to all the formerly silent victims of torture and abuse—the “soft targets” of Western oppression: colonized peoples, the poor, the weak, women, children, and homo- sexuals. Yet again, looking more closely, it was nothing of the sort. This new philosophical “system” implied no resolution, no synthesis, no expectation of salvation, no promise of a struggle in the name of unity—aspects that, for instance, Christianity and Marxism did share to a certain extent. Because it didn’t really promise a way out of the suffering, the new “discourse” seemed to abandon the world to its own confusion and insolvency. The best one could do, so went the advice, was to resist stubbornly the established powers of oppression and attempt to subvert them always by joining nuclei of guerrilla warfare, which maneuvered from the margins of society. In brief, what was being offered was a shorthand gospel of intellectual disobedience in the name of a sentimental connivance with the downtrodden of the world." [Preparata, The Ideology of Tyranny]
"The new trend took on the name of “postmodernism,” and its prophet was a white, thoroughly European male: Michel Foucault a darling of Western propaganda, whose decisive endorsement by the Parisian intelligentsia in 1966 and by its New York counterpart in 1975 transformed him instantly into an intellectual icon of the West. Foucault agreeably assumed the proffered role of guru, and in time came to be the leader of a veritable French invasion of America’s academia and educational institutions. An invasion which has consolidated itself twentyfive years later—at a time when, in Europe, the Foucauldian influence has been long dead—into a strong bastion of thought, wielding ever more money, converts, governmental leeway, publications, and power, power of the purest sort: intolerant and corrupt.
For lack of a better creed, and presumably disappointed by the utter failure of their country’s short-lived and scattered Socialist and hippie experiments in the recent past, waves of American intellectuals, educators, and publicists presently seem to have found sanctuary in the “rebel” construction of this late French, postmodernist school. From philosophy to literary criticism, via sociology and governmentality, the contagion has recently reached economics. The picture that emerges from this scramble is an odd one: among the lettered multitudes, we no longer see the “Left”: no coherent movement of dissent exists anymore—it is literally finished. Instead, the spectacle is one of affluent middle-class intellectuals, nearly all white males of European descent, that are divided into two factions: the Liberals (modernists) on one side, and the prankishly antagonizing postmodernists on the other. Under the cover of a politically correct truce signed in the name of propriety, the one faction (barely) tolerates the whims of the other, and while the modernists carry on business as usual, telling their pupils that life is a game of chance in which “the market” alone can take them to the top, the postmodernists reach conclusions not altogether dissimilar.
Put another way, postmodernist professors invite their classes to apply relativistic exercises and “deconstructivist” techniques, whereby the students are made to take apart a narrative and identify the social prejudices informing the text; but after the deconstruction has crushed all the idols, the class has in fact no option but to fall back upon whatever is the current system of belief, that is, the creed of self-interest and faith in the “free-market” with which every Anglo-Saxon is raised. Ten times out of ten the pupils are trained to take aim and fire at the privileged pet-peeves of postmodernism. These are: patriarchy, phallocracy, paternalism, racism, sexism, machismo, racist industrial pollution (that is, only that pollution that is putatively caused by the white elites and discharged on “minorities”), Europe, Eurocentrism, the white European male, the male in general, Columbus and the Catholics, religion, God, transcendence, metaphysics, the spirit, colonization and early imperialism, and sometimes, ever more infrequently, “capitalism,” preferably singled out as a vague synonym for economic oppression. Never, though, are the students made to visit the polemic upon the concrete working of the hierarchies of real power: say, to investigate the effective composition, functioning, and history of the political and financial establishments of the West.
The social sciences . . . suffer when fashionable nonsense and word games displace the critical and rigorous analysis of social realities.
Postmodernism has three principal negative effects: a waste of time in the human sciences, a cultural confusion that favors obscurantism, and a weakening of the political left. No research can progress on a basis that is both conceptually confused and radically detached from empirical evidence. What is worse is the adverse effect that abandoning clear thinking and clear writing has on teaching and culture. Students learn to repeat and to embellish discourses that they only barely understand. They can even, if they are lucky, make an academic career out of it by becoming expert in the manipulation of an erudite jargon.
In the end, even though in the classroom “God” and patriarchy have come to be arraigned, tried, and sentenced a million times, our system, as a whole, as many critics (including various postmodernists) have understood, is never questioned. Moreover, it is widely remarked that the postmodern attitude, in its craving for differentiation, erasure of boundaries, and permissiveness, is indeed highly compatible with the defining traits of our corporate, market-oriented age. This basic realization reveals that the apparent antagonism between modernists and postmodernists is somewhat feigned, if not imaginary.
Finally, the American Foucauldians adopted this myth to articulate the racial/gender divide along which blacks allegedly part from whites, and women from men, until each party rejoins its own isle of indigenous knowledge, pledg- ing to resist “at the margins” and to let the mutual hostility fester with no chance of reconciliation. Thus, with uncommon disingenuousness, feminism, homosexuality, and nonwhite ethnicity have been granted by the white establishment peer status in the grand arena of public discourse—through, for example, proclamations, exclusivist legislation such as Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action, and ad hoc academic departments. And from this kind of promotion to describing the post-9/11 rampage in Afghanistan as a “feminist war of liberation” there could only have been a short step. So ours is the story of a system of power, which, finding itself ever more under the grip of war-loving oligarchs that have brought intoxicating propaganda to new heights of virtuosity, resolved thirty years ago to promote openly the postmodern politics of diversity with the manifest intent of blocking any form of dissent and opposition. This politics of diversity is an academic treatment of Foucault’s Power/Knowledge, which is itself, a systematic re-elaboration of a creed of sorts invented by Bataille in the prewar era." [Preparata, The Ideology of Tyranny]
"The peaceable manifestation of matriarchy has also come under the name of “Demetrianism,” after the mother-goddess of fertility, Demeter. In general, dur- ing, matriarchal-chthonic festivities, “all men felt themselves to be free and equal; caste and class distinction no longer applied, and could be freely overturned; and a general licentiousness and pleasure in promiscuity tended to be rather wide- spread.” The Great Mother appeared to have been the tutelary divinity of the Silver Age, until degenerate variants made their disconcerting ingress into the mythological record. New cults began to make peculiar demands of their faithful: “Head hunting, human sacrifices, cannibalism were all accepted by man to ensure the life of plants. [ . . . ] For the vegetable world to continue, man must kill and be killed; in addition, he must assume sexuality to its extreme limit— the orgy.”
This was no play of lust and no moral perversion in the petty modern sense. Sacrifice is literally “the making of things sacred” (from the Latin sacrum facio), and the devotees of chthonic, bloody-orgiastic cults took most seriously the performance of such violent paroxysms as these, by all accounts, permitted them to commune religiously with those entities requesting the bloodshed (the holocaust) and to ensure the propagation of human and veg- etable life. These religious excesses were given sacred vent under two specular degenerate (and rebellious) mutations respectively of the “orthodox” male and female cults—that is, the (male) celestial being of the Golden Age and the Mother of the Silver Age. The two bloody offshoots were the Aphrodistic and Dionysian civilizations.
The celebration of the Great Goddess in its violent guise, whereby the mother gives way to the hetaera (the whore)—took place during special sacred festivals (saturnalia, Sacchean feasts, Cybele’s Mysteries, etc.), which entailed a variety of liturgies. To name but the most notorious: the slaying of a person representing the male regal figure, whom the Great Goddess had loved only for pleasure and not for procreation;12 self-castration on the part of priests, who, possessed by the Goddess, sought to transform themselves into the feminine type (e.g., the famous myth of the shepherd Attis, who emasculated himself in a Dionysian trance); and the inversion of sex, whereby
(1) statues of the goddesses would display masculine features, and
(2) men in the Mysteries would adorn themselves with the clothes of women and women with those of men—all signs that the vir- ile element had “come to be looked down upon as irrelevant,” “as a source of embarrassment.” Dionysism is the male version of the Aphrodistic deviation. Dionysus, the god of the bacchanalia, drunkenness, abandon, orgiastic furor, musical rapture, and poetic explosion—young Nietzsche’s favorite—is also the personification of erotic power, admittedly one of man’s, but above all woman’s,14 most fascinating sources of enthralling energy.
In Dionysism, Eros becomes “sacred frenzy,” mystic orgiasm: it is the highest pos- sibility inherent in this direction and it is aimed at undoing the bonds of matter and at producing a transfiguration through frenzy, excess and ecstasis . . . Dionysus was also represented as a demon of the infernal regions, and was often associated with the principle of water . . . The ecstatic and pantheistic orientation associated with the sexual element, predominates in the Mystery of the “sacred orgy”; frenzied contacts with the occult forces of the earth and maenadic and pandemic liberations occur in a domain that is simultaneously that of unrestrained sex, night and death.
But then, somewhat abruptly, unaccounted migratory patterns, featuring hordes of male-gods-worshipping warriors began to alter the religious map of the West. The Hellenic (Achaean, Ionian, and Dorian) invasions of Greece and Asia Minor early in the second millennium B.C. effected, in fact, a religious “redress”: this “redress” caused by the new invasions also signified a direct attack upon the matriarchal triad (of the Goddess in the form of maiden-mother-crone) by the knights of the north to restore the virile cult of the Golden Age. The Achaean and Ionian inroads into the preexistent southern gynaecocratic civilization led to an amalgam between the Aryan worship of the invaders and the local Goddess, who came to accept them as children and providers of sacred kings. “Thus a male military aristocracy became reconciled to female theocracy”: Zeus took Hera, the shrew-Goddess, as his (recalcitrant) wife. “All early myths about the gods’ seduc- tion of nymphs refer apparently to marriages between Hellenic chieftains and local moon-priestesses; bitterly opposed by Hera, which means by conservative religious feeling.” A most revealing myth in this connection is Apollo’s “rape” of Daphne. Contrary to the conventional interpretation, “Daphne was anything but a frightened virgin: her name was the contraption of Daphoene, ‘the bloody one,’ the goddess in orgiastic mood, whose priestesses, the maenads, chewed laurel-leaves16 [which contained cyanide of potassium] as an intoxicant and peri- odically rushed out at full moon, assaulted unwary travelers, and tore children or young animals into pieces.”17 To prevent Apollo from subduing Daphoene, Hera metamorphosed her into a tree. Rather than a sympathetic intervention in favor of “the bloody one,” the transformation symbolized opposition to the restoration of patriarchy. Thus, myth confirms that the Goddess herself was an intolerant dispenser of vehement prohibition.
As Robert Graves narrated in his Greek Myths, “when the Dorians arrived, towards the close of the second millennium,” matriarchy, already weakened, gave way to the institution of patrilineal succession. Hence the pantheon came to be governed by the Olympian family ruled by Zeus, and Hera had to submit unconditionally. However, because “the goddesses, though left in a minority, were never altogether ousted—as they were in Jerusalem—,” ancient Greek culture ended up representing a compromise of sorts between masculine and feminine sacredness. Significant traces of this somewhat uncomfortable cohabitation may be found in ancient Greece’s most accomplished Utopian synthesis: Plato’s Laws. Plato is squarely in the Apollinian camp, yet in the hierarchy he concedes to the “gods of the underworld” (oi chthónioi), grudgingly and in passing, a rev- erential awe that is their due, as well as a special month—the twelfth, Pluto’s (Hades, king-god of the nether world)—for their festivals.19 The fate of the mythical king Pentheus, whose tragic end Euripides immortalized in The Bacchae, was not lost on the school of Athens: because the Theban monarch refused to acknowledge Dionysus’s divinity, he was torn asunder by his own mother, Agauë, a priestess-maenad, in the course of an orgiastic delirium inspired by the god of revelry.
Under Plato’s Laws, no excesses are to be encouraged, but Dionysian power—of drink, music, and dance—if tamed, may be used for the glory of Apollo: a circumspect allowance, under the alert eye of Zeus, the One. In sum, the One had married Demeter, disciplined Dionysus, and chained bloody Daphoene in the cellar. Indeed, Frazer acknowledged that at Rome and Athens, male kinship was preceded by female kinship. And in his lengthy and colorful explo- ration of the social practices of the ancient matriarchies, he dwelt on the centrality of the sacrifice of the man-god, that is, on the ritual and periodic slaying of a divine king in his prime. This was done to ensure that the youthful vitality of the king would be captured and suffused throughout the observant community, preventing it thus from suffering weakness and decay. This tradition was clearly pervaded by the belief that the king was responsible for the weather and the crops, and that he might “justly pay with his life for the inclemency of the one and the failure of the other, as a ransom offered to the avenging demons.”In time, kings bent on retaining the privilege to rule, which they acquired by mar- rying into matrilineal dynasties, would devolve the sacrificial duty upon their own son, for no one “could so appropriately die for the king and, through him, for the whole people, as the king’s son.” “If there were not a symbolic dismemberment there could never be reintegration of the old parts, and there could be no new life pattern to replace the old one grown anemic by feeding only upon goodness.”
It thus appears that in pre-orthodox mythology, man-god is cloven, torn, unfinished: in myth he is split into two halves, a “Spirit of the Waxing Year” (e.g., Osiris), and a “Spirit of the Waning Year” (e.g., Set). Both halves compete for the love of the mother-goddess, who, unlike man-god, is allegedly a complete, whole divinity. “She can keep her feet always in the same place, whether in the sky, in the underworld or on this earth.”
She tries to satisfy both [Osiris and Set], but can only do so by alternate murder, and man tries to regard this as evidence of her falsity, not of his own irreconcilable demands on her. The Great Mother is Kali, the Indian goddess of both birth and destruction, mother, lover, and reaper, who unites “within her being opposing qualities, virginal and whorish, maternal and destructive.”28 She is the White Goddess, “the Mother of all living, the ancient power of fright and lust,” “both lovely and cruel, ugly and kind.” “As Nut she is the dark, star-studded night sky, circling over the earth, forming with her hands and feet the gateways to life and death.”
Of her several embodiments, it is the destructive whore, as will be seen, that would attract Georges Bataille (and Ernst Jünger) the most. Before marriage, in communities where the goddess held sway as Aphrodite or Astarte, “all women were obliged by custom to prostitute themselves to strangers at her sanctuary, and dedicate to her the wages earned by this sanctified harlotry.” “Marriage [was] considered hateful to the White Goddess.’ The archetype of the “whore as Goddess” would indeed give life to some of the most vivid personages of Bataille’s narrative (e.g., Madame Edwarda) and of his political economy (The Accursed Share), which is based on the notions of squander and dissipation—that is, erotic energy not aimed at procreation. The Goddess, as lover and mother, presided over the “alternate” murder and resurrection of the man-god. The cruel, capricious, incontinent White Goddess and the mild, steadfast, chaste virgin are not to be reconciled except in the nativity context.
The sacred dramas staged in her honor reenacted, as in our modern mass, the sacrificial death and rebirth of the male-hero. As Attis, the heroic man-god was said to be born of a virgin, miraculously. As Dionysus, instead, myth recounts that he occupied his father’s, Zeus’s, throne, and eventually suffered death by dismemberment at the hands of his enemies, the Titans, in the form of a bull, which thence came to be worshipped by the religious collective as the most sacred of animals. To Frazer, all such stories are the mythological expression of the ceremonial sacrifice of divine kings in matriarchal regimes.
A remarkable manifestation in these civilizations’ divine bestiaries, especially for its ambivalent significance, is the pig. Seen by many as unclean, the swine was yet untouchable, and this, some thought, was the mark its sacredness. This difference of opinion points to a hazy state of religious thought in which the idea of sanctity and uncleanness are not yet sharply distinguished, both being blent in a sort of vaporous solution to which we give the notion of taboo.
“Sacred filth” is, say, menstrual blood, which has filled men with dread for a long time and given rise as a result to a variety of prohibitions (taboos) affecting pubescent females. Furthermore, Frazer related how modern “civilized” nations have not entirely given up these rites, as they keep satisfying their archaic craving for scapegoating and solemn murder by executing criminals—the ulti- mate, modern foils for the sacrificial royalty of times long past. Crime and religion thus unite under the sign of “awful sanctity.” In the end, as hinted above, the Golden Bough reads like one inexorable debunking exposé of Christianity’s claim to religious originality (if not authenticity). The tale of a sun-king, son of an absent God-the-Father, born of a virgin (like Attis) at the winter solstice (like Dionysus, Apollo, and Mithras), who was slain before a lachrymose mother and resuscitated as the Redeemer at Easter, and whose body was transubstantiated into bread (a practice also known to the ancient Mexicans), appears to be a popular mythological template upon which the new Judeo-Christian ortho- doxy grafted the economic radicalism of a mysterious and seductive Hebrew ascetic: the young teacher Joshua.
Thus, we may say that Bataille, and later Foucault, reckoned with three main spiritual forces that appear to have shaped modernity:
(1) a compassionate tradition bound to a belief in transcendence (i.e., that here is something beyond this life, however impenetrable it might be to our hearts and minds), sacred geometry, and the good—this tradition we will classify from now on as “Apollinian”;
(2) the mechanical age of industrial power, and its associated mentality of thrift and efficiency;
(3) and the bloody worship of yore. Buddhism, Platonism and neoplatonism, for instance, would fall under the Apollinian cate- gory, whereas Christianity appears somewhat torn between the first and the third form of worship: it is indeed compassionate, but, as Bataille would obsessively remark, its myth is deeply rooted in blood and sacrifice (the crucifixion), as well as in its insistent offer of unbounded forgiveness, which, Bataille interjected with reason, implies perforce the consummation of unbounded crimes.
As for these three spiritual forces, the first Bataille, as a young Catholic seminarian, used to fear, but he subsequently deemed it moribund and defeated, if not entirely meaningless; the second he saw as the mediocre usurper of “sacred energy” (i.e., the lifeblood of humanity)—sacred energy which, once it is har- nessed to the machines and the logic of profit, becomes vitiated and assumes the form of what Bataille calls “power.” The third was in his eyes the authentic path: though the rites of blood sacrifice were shocking, to embrace them was to him the most consistent, honest, and sensible practice if he were to make (non)sense of this world in the face of its endless torment, inexplicable suffering, and the gaping abyss of death. In other terms, Bataille wished for a new empire of Kali: he longed to reconcile in one creed the blooming of flowers with the carnage of flesh.
The Apostles of Chaos write since the early Christian era to lament, in the words of a modern commentator, that we humans “are exploited on a cosmic scale,” that we are the “proletariat” of a second-tier god (a “demiurge-executioner”), who exiled us, “slaves,” “into a world that is viscerally subjected to violence. We are the dregs and sediment of a lost heaven, strangers on our own planet.” “The order of evil,” is recognized through the incessant “necessity of destroying and devouring. A necessity so widespread, so planetary, that it places war and nutrition on an identical plane. Seen in this perspective, wars are nothing but an inescapable means by which communities feed themselves and survive. This and much else is true of Gnosis." [Preparata, The Ideology of Tyranny]
"In no word in any other language than French or English can we find such a comprehensive précis of bygone ages. A student needs only to know its etymology in order at once to be able to give a reliable account of European misrule and its deplorable consequences. Without needing to resort to one dusty and crumbling document of the past, he will hold in his hand all the clues to the origin of Liberalism together with its mentally defective offspring, Democracy, Socialism, Communism, Feminism and Anarchy. He will also be in possession of a synopsis of all the political imbecilities of your Regicides, Revolutionists, Republicans and Radicals, with their various stooges from John Ball, Lilburne, Hartlib, Walwyn and Winstanley, to Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Godwin, Bentham, J. S. Mill, Bernard Shaw, Marx, Lenin et hoc genus omne. For, in the etymology of the one word DANGER, a political tragedy of prodigious consequence lies concealed, although even the most erudite philologists rarely draw the obvious inferences from it.
Developed gradually
It is a word whose modern sinister meaning developed gradually out of the innocent old French word "dangier", signifying dominion, authority power — the power of a lord or master (dominium). Originally, all it implied was lordship. To be in anyone's "danger" meant simply to be under his jurisdiction, authority or control. Chaucer in the 14th century still used the word in this sense. Lydgate, his junior by some 30 years, did likewise. In the 42nd stanza of his "A Sayenge of the Nyghtyngale", he speaks of Christ's bearing His Cross to Calvary to make us strong against the "dangier" (power) of non-Christian forces. Shakespeare, in
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, makes Portia ask Antonio whether he stands in Shylock's danger or not — meaning Shylock's power (Act IV, Sc. I). And THE NEW ENGLISH DICTIONARY quotes a passage from Bishop Ridley's works (1556) to illustrate how the word was still being used in the 16th century — that is to say, merely as a synonym for authority or control. "They put themselves", wrote the Bishop, "in the danger of King Ahab saying, 'Behold we have heard that the kings of the house of Israel are pitiful and merciful'."
Do we need much imagination, much arduous guessing, to discover how a word originally meaning no more than authority, control, jurisdiction, could ultimately have so consistently and permanently earned the sinister connotation of jeopardy, fatal hazard, mortal peril, as to serve even the most illiterate of two great nations — France and England — as a universal premonition of disaster, if not of death?
What could have happened to turn this innocent word into a terrifying token of threatening ruin? What must generations of powerful men have consistently done in order insensibly to make the populations of two such countries as France and England convert a word connoting merely authority, control and power, into a signal of alarm and of threatening Nemesis?
Centuries of disreputable conduct
In view of the ignorance of psychology and history among the masses, no one can be surprised that the centuries of disreputable conduct on the part of ruling men, which culminated in the transformation of "dangier" into DANGER, should have been interpreted by the common people of both France and England as a conclusive proof of the worthlessness of patriarchal control and authority — in fact, of Aristocracy. For the masses are not composed of thinkers, and such hasty, half-baked and makeshift substitutes for the shameful misrule of men who had no business to be masters at all — such substitutes as Liberalism, Democracy and Universal Suffrage — must seem to an oppressed and ill-used populace the very essence of wisdom and political sanity. This, however, does not excuse the so-called "thinkers" from John Ball to Bernard Shaw, whom I have enumerated above, for having endorsed the panic stricken innovations seized upon by an outraged mob who saw only DANGER in dangier. It does not excuse them for having failed to distinguish the sins of the magisterial class from the institution of Magistracy itself, and for having condemned the principle of the rule of the best before making sure that the sins of misrule had indeed been committed by the "Best".
They would have needed to look only so far as Northern Italy, or back to ancient Egypt, in order to have learnt that dangier by no means logically or necessarily implied DANGER. And if they blindly acquiesced in the mob's hasty and makeshift substitutes for patriarchal rulership, they confessed themselves as incompetent as the crowd they pretended to lead. It may now be far too late to hope to purge DANGER of the dread it insures. But may we nevertheless not look forward to the day when it may be, if not superseded at least paralleled, at all railway crossings, electrical installations, munition factories, and on all unsafe beaches and rocky shores, by the one word LIBERALISM or DEMOCRACY? — It may be that no such supersession is likely to occur for many years; but that there are signs of such a change few perspicacious observers could deny.
Anarchy spreading fast
Anarchy, with all its crimes and perils is fast spreading over England and France. The pursuit of so-called "Freedom" has turned out to be merely the establishment of universal Licence; and as the Western World long ago abandoned the belief in the possibility of wise rulers, a class of wise leaders has ceased to be bred. Before the day of ultimate reckoning arrives, however, it may not be wholly bootless for those unfamiliar with the social history of England and France, to ponder on the centuries of largely inarticulate suffering that must have elapsed before a harmless notion like that suggested by the word "Dangier" could, through the conduct of cads, become a warning of imminent catastrophe. Must we wait for such a change to overtake the words Liberalism and Democracy?" [Ludovici]
"A key assumption among egalitarians is that equality of opportunity must produce equality of outcome, and that, when outcomes are unequal, it is because an individual or group of individuals have enjoyed an unfair advantage. Egalitarians have a materialist worldview, so unfair advantage is always reducible to material conditions, which, in their view, and in the broadest possible sense, is the main determinant of outcomes. This unfair advantage is referred to as “privilege.” To combat privilege, the key strategy of egalitarianism is redistribution: those thought to have enjoyed unfair advantages are subjected to extraction, and the extracted “excess” is transferred over to those thought to have suffered unfair disadvantages."
"Old classic leftism likes to destroy, but only in order to replace memories of the past with a vision of the future. It aims at the establishment of a cast-iron order, at symmetry, at monolithic sameness: The young New Left, on the contrary, delights in disorder and chaos. An ‘authoritarian person’ might be neatly dressed and scrupulously clean, whereas the typical representative of the New Left loves sloppiness, informality, and the reflection of his mental disorderliness in his appearance, in his entire way of life. His parents worshiped the Golden Calf. He venerates the Golden Swine. The New Left represents the left’s suicidal conquest of the children of the so-called exploiters. It is suicidal because the young bourgeois who turns to the New Left is no more a genuine leftist than an albino in the Central Congo is a ‘white man'." [Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse]
"In no word in any other language than French or English can we find such a comprehensive précis of bygone ages. A student needs only to know its etymology in order at once to be able to give a reliable account of European misrule and its deplorable consequences. Without needing to resort to one dusty and crumbling document of the past, he will hold in his hand all the clues to the origin of Liberalism together with its mentally defective offspring, Democracy, Socialism, Communism, Feminism and Anarchy. He will also be in possession of a synopsis of all the political imbecilities of your Regicides, Revolutionists, Republicans and Radicals, with their various stooges from John Ball, Lilburne, Hartlib, Walwyn and Winstanley, to Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Godwin, Bentham, J. S. Mill, Bernard Shaw, Marx, Lenin et hoc genus omne. For, in the etymology of the one word DANGER, a political tragedy of prodigious consequence lies concealed, although even the most erudite philologists rarely draw the obvious inferences from it.
Quote :
"Every individual or national degradation is immediately heralded by a rigorously proportional degradation in language. How could man lose an idea or merely the correctness of an idea without losing the word or the accuracy of the word that expresses it?" [De Maistre]
"Liberalism is essentially the belief that there can be a reconciliation of all difficulties and differences, and since there can't, it is a misleading way to approach politics." [Maurice John Cowling]
"The relativism in Lyotard’s thesis was its most superficial trait; the message and the intent—roughly the same as Bataille’s and Foucault’s—were more subtle.
For Lyotard, cases involving conflict between (at least) two parties “cannot be equally resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments,” because “there is no neutral ground upon which to adjudicate between competing claims, no synthesizing master discourse that can reproduce the speculative unity of knowledge.” With this reformulation we found ourselves on thinner ice than we did with Foucault, for now we could not even afford the privilege to declare whether something was “disgusting!” or not: we could still manifest that much through deeds, of course, but the threshold of hypocrisy set for the discursive game had been raised. “Dispersion,” Lyotard soothed, was “good in itself.”
[ . . . ] The imparting of knowledges no longer appears as destined to form an elite capable of guiding the nation [ . . . ], it provides the system with players capable of fulfilling suitably their role at the pragmatic posts that are needed by the insti- tutions. In this sense, the “democratic” university [ . . .] of our day appears scarcely performative. Therefore, knowledge should no longer be foisted “in blocks,” as it is custom- arily done in the West through the reading assignments of the so-called Great Books, but should rather be displayed and dispensed “à la carte.” From menus of itemized bits of information, languages, and language-games, students might selectively piece together the installments of the narrative that would best caption their “technical and ethical experience.” Keeping abreast of the technological shift and of the new computer mania, Lyotard gazed ahead and forecast that, so long as it was expressible in computer language, didactic information might best be entrusted to machines and data bases.
Data bases are the encyclopedia of tomorrow. [ . . . ] They are ‘nature’ for the post-modern man. The “Professor” would disappear, driven to extinction by the postmodern erasure of metanarratives and the electronic repackaging of higher learning. The Professor had been the enforcer, the disciplinarian of imperial, racist metadiscourses—he would not be missed. Moreover, he could not claim to have a mind more capacious than the storage facilities of modern information networks, nor could he vaunt to possess greater competence than the interdisciplinary teams of experts that would be in charge of imagining “new games.” Then, gauged by the criterion of “performativity,” the question posed by the student would no longer be, “Is it true?” but, “Of what use is it?” In the context of the mercantilization of knowledge, this question signifies most often: is it saleable?
And so we ask: What would these machines pass on to the user? “Established knowledge,” was Lyotard’s answer.
“Established knowledge”? Established by whom?
This was remarkable. Or rather, this was what one was bound to obtain by crossing Power/Knowledge with IT—Foucault’s power reticulation had simply become the computer network. Conveniently, the speculative plane had been rid of the hidebound rector, and the rector replaced by the interdisciplinary team of experts playing games. The postmoderns were suggesting that everyone not willing to adjust should leave the lecture hall to them. Who would then teach the pupils the (essential) metadiscourse that there is no metadiscourse? Who is to spread the message about deligimation itself ? Not any technocrat or computer program. It will have to be the professor, someone like Lyotard himself. Since the collapse of the grand narratives is itself a grand narrative, there is a logical necessity for at least some grand narrative. Naturally. Thereafter, postmodern education in America could take the following propedeutic turn: in the early years of formation, the devotees of Lyotard proposed to communicate “enough of what is held to be true by the society to which the children belong so that they can function as citizens of that society.” At the higher level, they suggested that “the role of education is not to pass on the truth, but to edify.”
“To edify”? The suggested pedagogy thus appeared to resolve itself into a preliminary rehashing of Liberal indoctrination, followed by “edification”—by which means, was not clearly explained. After storming the palace of higher learning, Lyotard was presumably envisaging an arrangement whereby the interdisciplinary clans and their chieftains would collude with the grant-generous IT industry (a partner for hardware, media, and distance learning) and the business schools (“is it saleable?”), which, most of all, live by the ethos of performativity, to divide the “endowments for education” among themselves. It is fascinating how this practical understanding of contemporary education could have since been classed among the representative analyses of the “Left.”
Post-modernism merely recommended that the debate be truncated at a point where most fundamental questions about the nature of our social realities still remained unanswered. We should thus be satisfied with piling trivia in our heads, and call it quits. This was the “end of education”: compact and standardized accounts (who writes?) of, say, Shiism, Marxism, and the Spanish Civil War would be a click away from the pupils (“downloadable from the net,” as we say today), and the remainder of one’s training would be taken care of in the campuses of trade, technical, and vocational schools—the infamous “colleges.” Education—like art, science, and perhaps political history as well—may have reached its historical fulfillment. [ . . . ] We have reached the end. [ . . . ] It is the beginning of the post-millennium blues.
Masters of the house, what would these postmodern practitioners of interdisciplinarity presently busy themselves with? They would focus on the “undecidables,” chaos, catastrophe, paradox, and the like.
“Postmodern science,” said Lyotard, would not “produce the known, but the unknown.” Bataillean blather, once again. To wit: The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a good taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable." [Preparata, The Ideology of Tyranny]
