They begin to atrophy, hormonal drops (feminization) after a long period of gradual loss of the original function. The intermediate stage is one of play, creativity, like one plays with one's hair now that it is no longer required for warmth.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
Post-Modern equivalent of Frankenstein. Parts combined over a frame, the spiritualists call it soul, or spirit; a mainframe, manufactured to a common design. Additional parts are interchangeable and purchased at will, for a price.
The body ceases to have a history, it has a version, to be updated when new parts are invented. The parts are not the Cyborg, like the organs are not the organism in our Nihilistic times. The parts are add-on, over a basic model, to be renewed, every so often, as advancements in techniques/technologies arise.
Each part has a numerical designation, which identifies the Cyborg. The parts only have purpose in relation to work; an object/objective shared Choosing the parts the Cyborg expresses its subjective judgment in relation to the shared object/objective, and finds its place among other Cyborgs in relation to this labour.
The only distinguishing marker is the Cyborg's particular specialty, its expertise, in relation to this shared object/objective, this shared work. Each Cyborg acquires the part necessary to carry out it specialized function....no other distinction is permitted. All Cyborgs can change vocation, specialize and alter their function. All they need to change their identity is training/education, reprogramming.
The mainframe connects all Cyborgs to a shared pool of data, and parts. All parts are purely cosmetic, and different only in relation to the task each one was designed to carry out. All Cyborgs are manufactured using the same base model. All Cyborgs can upgrade at will, if they carry out their tasks efficiently, and are rewarded for their work. The Cyborgs advancement can be gauged by what version its parts are. Older, outdated parts, designate inefficiency.
A related and different application of the Cyborg metaphor is wrt. the modern state, esp. Israel as [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].
It is half human, and half machine built with pure [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]...
"With Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, Tokyo Fist and Bullet Ballet, Shinya Tsukamoto has become one of the most widely praised filmmakers in Japan today. Edgy, intense and overwhelming, Tsukamoto's films are nightmarish visions of a world in which man's greatest enemy is his own environment of cold concrete and twisted technology. His debut film, the legendary cyberpunk masterpiece Tetsuo: The Iron Man, saw him compared to David Lynch, David Cronenberg and Ridley Scott. The film rejuvenated the Japanese film industry, paving the way for an entire generation of young Japanese directors Hideo Nakata (The Ring) and Takeshi Kitano (Zatoichi). It also deeply influenced Western filmmakers as diverse as Quentin Tarantino (Kill Bill), David Fincher (Fight Club) and the Wachowski Brothers (The Matrix)."
"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.
This quotation from »Neuromancer« illustrates a setting of interactions between »regular« people, transferred in a mathematically reproduced reality. Technology is meant to be a tool to be used, a device that makes life easier. It is a prolonging of some sort of human behaviour to the machine. The Man-Machine-Interaction (MMI) works on rationally driven thoughts, people stay themselves whereas their surrounding becomes highly artificial.
In »Tetsuo« the viewer is confronted with one of the most dense MMI’s ever seen in film- history. For further better understanding, I want to point out that for the complex of the MMI in the context of »Tetsuo« it is important to bear in mind that we have to deal with exterior connotations, with a translocation of the body towards an exterior body which is concrete, analogue and figurative. Not the surrounding but the body itself becomes highly artificial. The organic body becomes metallic and illustrates the mimetic structures of changed states of reality. We not deal with abstract (like in the digital version of the MMI) but with concrete (= analogue) metaphors: The nervous system is substituted with wires, veins become tubes, blood transforms to oil, the whole body consists of all varieties of metal junk.
Here, »Tetsuo« signifies a break with the long tradition of the topic: Thinking of more or less highly artificial robots like the »Machine- Maria«, »Robbie«, the three »Terminators«, the »Blade Runner« or even »Robocop«, »Tetsuo« on the contrary generates its MMI via junk, via materials we are surrounded by day by day. »Tetsuo« exemplifies the apotheosis of a new version of human existence not via a rationalized techno- dream (in terms of common understanding) but constitutes an iconography of the superficial via an ensemble of wasted goods.
At this point, Cyberpunk comes in. As the original Punk in the 70s, old and useless materials were used in order to re-contextualize the signs of waste, to re-territorialize the body as a political field and to put a sign against established values. The body-concepts in this film are crude, but/ that’s why they combine all the »negative« affects that machines in their sterile self-understanding should have had wiped out: tactile qualities, pain, death and the visibility of body fluids. A.R. Stone summarizes the lacks: »[...] structures of individual caring, love, and perhaps the most poignant, of desire«.
»Tetsuo« in all its compound textures and layers of iconographic, narrative and filmic codes is not interested in an updated »C3-I«-language (Computer Communication Control Intelligence) but quite strictly maintains an MMI which is disconnected from certain paradigms of time and space.
Desire – ranging from its most simple to its most complex connotations – becomes in »Tetsuo« an act of violent fetishism and self-mutilation. The film locates the MMI on a level of degeneration, where language has changed to some syllables without meaning. They resemble more to sounds of an animal or a machine than to a human being. »Tetsuo« is an audiovisual feast of the transformation of an »useful« member of nowadays’ society – a Business Man – to an useless metal-monster, merged together with a metal- fetishist, ready to change the world into rust. What an affront. This affront is as big as to keep desires in a completely techno-mediated surrounding...
The term »machine« should not be taken literally. »Machine« means a complex cluster of non-organically mediated spheres of existence, both on an individual and on a collective level. The machine is understood as an abstract – in the context of »Tetsuo« – yet organic metaphor for a technically generated body. »Tetsuo« clearly can be identified as a symptom of a crisis in Japanese society. Looking at the past of Japan’s Horror-movies, the invasion of the country and the Atom bomb became paradigmatic topics. But today the ‘invadee’ is not primarily the geographical Japan, but the mental Japan..."
When nature/past is no longer relevant, and pleasure is the only objective, the "individual" can be mechanical - a fabrication, as all Modern identifications are supposed to be. Why not a could not a machines call itself woman, or man, when the word has lost all natural identifiers and is now associated with pleasure giving?
Technology, as extension of man, makes the robot a device for self-referential pleasure - masturbation.
The only criterion is that the one purchasing the device, the service, remain convinced, be fooled, tricked by the artifice - being fooled means to remain in his daydream. Even the word "species" is being redefined - this is "progress". A relief for the majority, who want to detach, escape from nature/past, from self, and want to immerse themselves in otherness, become other.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
The Wounded Artist: Blacksmiths and the Under-world
Ciantis wrote:
"These creatures [blacksmiths] share particular qualities that place them in intimate relationship with the forge and fire, knowledge of the earth and its minerals and treasures, and the uncanny skill of artisans and artists. Their relationship to humankind is elusive, indirect, and marginal, and their powers are sometimes viewed as beneficial, sometimes malign. Residing both literally and figuratively “underground,” they partake in qualities shared with the shaman: knowledge of the properties of natural as well as supernatural things. Further, receiving their magical skills from the feminine Earth, the chthonic phallic deities are nurturers and healers.
Lotte Motz observes that the etymology of the Germanic term smith indicates it is not limited in meaning to metal working, but indicates making generally (Motz 80). She ultimately suggests that the Greek poieio—meaning “to make” and the origin of the word poetry—is the term that applies. The divine chthonic phallic cohort are artful makers and technicians of the sacred. The Dactyls (and/or the Kabeiroi) are inventors of poetic meter, and smiths in Northern European mythology are associated with poetry and bardic song; strangers near the abodes of the dwarf mountain smiths are traditionally warned by the rhythmic music of hammer on anvil, said to be the origin of poetry.
One of the signal features of this complex of inter-related images is physical disability or some physical characteristic or marking which separates the mythic figure from the rest of gods and humankind, like the round eye in the middle of the Cyclops’ foreheads. Jung notes that “[u]gliness and deformity are especially characteristic of those mysterious chthonic gods, the sons of Hephaistos, the [Kabeiroi], to whom mighty wonder-working powers were ascribed” (CW 5: 183). Jung notes also that “Hephaistos, Wieland the Smith and Mani (founder of Manichaeism, famous also for his artistic gifts) had crippled feet. The foot [. . .] is supposed to possess a magical generative power” that is specifically phallic (Jung, CW 5: 183). Folklorist Stith Thompson observes that “[d]warfs [. . .] are sometimes spoken of as having their feet twisted backward [. . .]” (Thompson, The Folktale 248-49). Indeed, this is how Hephaistos is pictured in certain Greek vase paintings, including an amphoriskos (Athens National Museum 664; rpt. in Brommer, Pl. 10.1), a cauldron (Rhodes 10.711; rpt. in Brommer, Pl. 11.1), a hydria (Vienna M.218; rpt. in Brommer, Pl. 11.1), and a fifth-century BCE dinos from Sicily (Würzburg H 5352; rpt. in Perseus Vase Catalog).
In addition to the smiths’ fundamental connection with the magical, poetic, and plastic arts, the “making” of the chthonic phallic cohort includes healing and foster- parenting.
A key quality of the smith gods is the containment of opposites and ambivalences. The properties of iron include its red hotness and malleability, but it also very quickly becomes “[. . .] white, hard, cold and unyielding” (Drewel 240). The blacksmith’s irreducibly opposite qualities include both “fiery” and “cool” (Babalola 147)
Like their brother and sister shaman gods, the blacksmith-artist gods function as mythic containers of ambivalent and seemingly irreconcilable qualities and attitudes: masculinity and femininity, hot and cold, chaos and order, violence and nurturance, art and technology. That their imaginal connections to to the Hephaistos myth have been marginalized or forgotten points to the fragmentation of the mythic image of the artful maker once represented by the blacksmith/artist/shaman.
Milton summons up Hephaistos, under another Roman name for the god, Mulciber, in Paradise Lost (1667). There Milton makes use of Homer’s account of Hephaistos’ wounding fall when he is thrown from Olympus by rageful Zeus, making this motif an echo of the fall of Lucifer from heaven. Mulciber, once the renowned architect of Heaven before he intrigued against Zeus, is now the architect of Lucifer’s brazenly magnificent Hell (Milton, Paradise Lost I:730-751). In Milton’s theme of the artist thrown from heaven and damned can be seen the faint outline of one thread issuing from the Hephaistos mythos that has stretched from the distant image of the smith-god and the chthonic phallic cohort—all creator gods associated with magic and mystery— into that part of the contemporary imagination that regards the artist with vestiges of ancient fear and suspicion, as a possessor of quasi-magical skills that carry with them a societal stigma of difference, defiance, and deviance.
The wounded artist. A development in the history of ideas is the philological and scientific interest in myth and mythogenesis as a feature of an earlier stage in human existence. F. Max Müller, the nineteenth-century mythographer, and, slightly later, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, the early twentieth-century philosopher, psychologist, and ethnologist, used the term mythopoesis to characterize what they supposed to be a feature of primitive human thought, “wherein myth and metaphor, rather than the supposedly later-developed science and logos, became dominant” (Doty, Mythography 20). By 1913, both Freud and Jung recognized myth and symbol as a pathway to the contents of the unconscious.
Freud was fascinated by the myth of the artist as a species of sacred monster, certain of whose creative energies and/or creative inhibitions could be seen to be lodged in pathology (Trilling 504).
For some depth psychologists, Hephaistos, the crippled god of craft, has specifically come to signify the wounded psyche of the artist. Indeed, the wounded artist is taken as a visible symptom of society’s woundedness, a sort of canary in the coal mine of malaise of soul in an age cut off from meaning. Depth psychologist Murray Stein has written about Hephaistos as the archetype representing the pathology of the mother-wounded psyche of the introverted, angry, sexually compromised male artist. Some of the suspicion of the artist is a remnant of the ancient creator-artist gods’ ability to make uncanny imitations of life, and the ancient blacksmith-sorcerer gods’ capability of cursing life.
Monstrous technology. In the United States, members of the post-WWII “baby boom” and earlier generations are most likely to associate the god’s name with heavy-industrial products or combustive processes expressive of Vulcan’s volcanic fire, for example “Vulcanized” rubber tires, Vulcan Motor Oil, or the statue that since the 1907 World Exposition has towered over Birmingham, Alabama as emblem of the city’s metal-forging industry (and inspired Birmingham’s local “Vulcan” popular-music record label [Mike’s Pix: Rhythm and Blues 78’s]).
Though large parts of the Hephaistean mythos have seemingly been forgotten or dispersed, the psychic interrelationship between technology, magic and creativity—as well as the shadow of this conjunction—can readily be discerned in ideas and artistic productions and indeed in daily headlines which never name the god, but are nevertheless inspired by him.
The Hephaistean theme of technology naturally involves images and analogues of forging and metalsmithing, and specifically of arms manufacture (hence the association with heavy industry and military materiél). It also involves, in contemporary analogues, robotics and bioengineering. Some of Hephaistos’ mythic creations have humanoid forms. Pandora, the archetypal woman, created by Hephaistos from clay at Zeus’s orders, is meant to bedevil mankind, who otherwise might pretend to the status of gods after having received the knack of controlling the fire stolen by Prometheus from Hephaistos’ forge. The mechanical forge assistants Hephaistos fashions out of gold are said to be both beautiful and intelligent. (Iliad 18:488-93). Hephaistean mythemes are notably implicit in science fiction, dating from the beginning of the industrial age. The mytheme of humans arrogating to themselves the powers of gods is ubiquitous but the attempt to fabricate life from scratch, as it were, is specifically Hephaistean. Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein is the tale of the hubristic attempt of a young physicist to create life, with dire consequences. The stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann, written in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, concern sinister scientists and uncanny humanoid dolls so lifelike that humans are induced to fall in love with them, a fatal mistake (just as Zeus intended when he ordered the creation of Pandora). Hoffmann’s most famous tales were later recast into Jacques Offenbach’s opera Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Leo Delibes’ ballet Coppelia, and Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Ballet. The nineteenth-century fascination with automata has persisted into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, witnessed by the continuing popularity of the opera and ballets mentioned, and of science fiction.
The Hephaistean archetype is clearly present in the guise of the corporate manager (as exemplified in Nadolny’s fiction), who increasingly signifies the impersonal, intertwined forces of capital, political influence (often clandestine), and advanced technology. As developer of Vulcan’s prototype nuclear ballistic missile, the god is also imaginally implicated as complicit in the creation of the ultimate technological fire— ‘weapons of mass destruction.’
Rich as they are, there is something missing in all of these examples of Hephaistean mythopoesis. It is as if the progress of the god, at least from the time of the Renaissance until today, has proceeded without true consciousness of the divine quality of imagination itself, specifically the divine imagination that produced the fantastic shield of Achilles and inspired Homer’s breathless description of its amazing conception. What is more, it seems as if the further in time the remythologizing is separated from the ancients, the less magical and fleet of imagination Hephaistos appears, and the more grimy. He has become pathologized into an image of creative and relational blockage, through anger or repression, or alternatively, into the willing and willful purveyor of at best prosaic, at worst deathly materiél. No longer is he seen to serve the imaginative purposes of the maker, whose engagement with matter issues in beautiful, useful, appropriate and enlivening works of art and industry. The image of the divine blacksmith-artist has been sooted into unrecognizability." [Hephaestos]
Although there are many different definitions of Witch and Warlock there is one central idea that connects them all: the word. Difference between Warlock and Witch, other than their usage of evil, rather than good magic, is their sex – usually Warlocks are associated with the male and with the evil, and when females are called Warlocks it is because they evoke the masculine and dark magic. For the purposes of this exposition warlock will refer to a male and Witch to a female practitioner of magic, of both the good and the evil, the light and the dark. Using incantations, verbal spells, accompanied with gestures, ritualized movements, looks, dances, sounds, smells, textures, the Witch casts her spells. Her power is found in the words themselves, for they are produced by a human brain and they are effective only within a human brain.
We can trace this effect back to the animal world where a grunt and a growl transmits to another creature, even one belonging to another species, the sense of pain and the insinuation of a threat. To grunt or growl to a plant will have no effect; to scream at a worm or a butterfly will do nothing but expel gusts of air and vibrations that may have a slight effect. The similarity of the nervous system is what is important. Among higher life-forms, that share a common ancestry and so have developed a similar nervous system, a grunt, a growl, and a scream are easily understood, but use a more sophisticated form of a sound, like one that produces a pattern, such as a word, and the effect is lost, unless you accompany it with a gesture, a tone, or some other primitive form of expression that will send the message. Say, in a soft voice “I will kill you” to a dog and it will wag its tail and lick your hands, accompany the words with a forced air explosion from your lungs, and a violent gesture, and a look, and the message is received.
The medium must be one shared by the ones involved in the information exchange, otherwise the effect is minimal. The magical power of the chant, the word, the symbol, is really one of transmitting an effect from one living organism to the other, from one nervous system to the other, and since nervous systems connect the organs to the brain, the effect flows from brain through nervous system to every cell in the organism’s body. This is what a spell caster does. (S)He transmits a desirable effect, using a medium the other can process, in humans a shared language, accompanied by primal gestures, sounds, tonalities, crescendo, and accentuating the effect with smells, the burning of incense, with textures, a carpeted room in red, or a stone grey floor, with symbols, some mysterious, menacing, mystical, and the appropriate lighting for the shadows to produce the required state of mind in the primal part of the other’s brain, and, then, repetition: the continuous, ritualized, evocation, similar to commercial, and brainwashing practices. From the brain of the Witch the sensation, has been transplanted into another’s brain, and through the brain it can have an effect upon his entire body – psychosomatic effect, and placebo effect. Hypnotists, a form of witchcraft, employs this method, first by choosing, from the audience, those who seem susceptible, and impressionable, and then by convincing them that the hypnotist, does indeed, possess the power (s)he professes to possess. Same thing with “faith healers”, and all types of sorcery. The effect is temporary, and only lasts as long as the conviction remains in the “victim” nervous system, as a residual effect. This fades in time, and along with it the… magic.
*****
As with all human practices there are those who occupy themselves with a more legitimate form of magic – one where the Modern definition would require a revamping, and a rescuing of the word from the clutches of the Nihilists who only wish to discredit all natural forms of spirituality, to leave behind their disconnected, surreal, unreal, nihilistic Abrahamic staples, as the best of all “possible worlds”.
Of these we can say that they are a more visceral variant of the scientific method, once producing alchemy, as the precursor to chemistry, and astrology, as the precursor to astronomy. The difference gradually developed, as the Nihilistic dis-ease morphed from a religion, reliant on the super-natural, to an ideology, reliant on the worship of futurism, the yet to be, the immanent – we can include the worship of youth, and the immediate, the superficial, as part of this development; from Paradise, in the beyond, to Utopia, in the soon to be, in the coming.
Now the Witches, Warlocks, Wizards, Sorcerers, Shamans become different variations of the tribal spiritual leader - the pagan variant of the Abrahamic priest. As a practitioner of magic such a man or woman, would look for patterns in the world, in nature, to represent as symbols, words, in the hope of finding the underlying essence of the relationship between man and cosmos. A discipline seeking signs, out there in the world, that correlate to human processes; the externalization of internal ordering. Numerology, semiology, all hermeneusis of natural patterns into human codes - to facilitate the processing, and to find a cosmic pattern to bind it all into a whole. The risk of misconstruing the method for the fact remains, as a human weakness, seducing many a mind to its calling. This is how the honest magician is transformed into another "grifter", and exploiter of human ignorance, and frailty, and another manipulator of human need, and the nature/past most deny as being relevant, and present.
When the power of words was appreciated some turned to the beyond, time and space, to base their claims, and became priests, while others, the few, insisted on basing them in nature, and became pariahs, caricatures to be laughed at, and dismissed as children's tales, when the truth was that the former only mattered within human systems, reliant on infecting as many followers as possible (quantities) to construct and maintain their fabrications, whereas the latter's magic was independent of human agreement, and quantities, because their source came directly from natural patterns (cycles, rhythms, vibrations...), which they emulated symbolically and verbally.
Nature has always mystified the common man. All the way back to the time when fire was made, those who knew how to control the forces of nature, were held in high esteem – of holding onto great powers and magical forces they were accused of; often feared and killed, to deal with their own fear. They were the original scapegoats, the ones burned and tortured to appease some incomprehensible reality, out there, and all around them. Perhaps it was these magi who convinced the people to direct their fears upon animals and inanimate objects, so as to save themselves from their wrath.
Counter-Intuitive reality, and the inescapable, and unpredictable, forces of nature, had to be dealt with, and a killing, the ultimate display of cost, the price of being conscious of existence, was the only method. The gods, would take them seriously then, the ignorant primitive thought. But to no avail, so then the solution was found to explain why these calamities happened during certain periods in time and space, and why a cycle was being followed – the scapegoat, as the seasonal sacrifice, to calm the unruly forces of nature, was the best alternate solution to man’s desire to control himself and the world he was forced to exist within. But that didn’t help for long, when seasonal cycles were not followed and calamities occurred at random, and without warning. Man, came up with another solution… the pattern was beyond time/space, in the unreal, where no man, except the worthy could see, and only they could read and decipher. The Priest was that man of “God”. He could not be blamed, as his ancient predecessors were, not would he lose credibility, being only a go-between, a humble servant of a mysterious, Divine entity, not even he could adequately define and explain. Witchcraft became religion and was institutionalized, to give it that added communal acknowledgement, that self-serving manmade credibility. All calamities, all incomprehensible forces, could be blamed on a beyond, which, by being beyond, required no further explanation, or justification – it was the “Will of God” and that was enough.
But time changes everything, and along with it the power of the word, the magic, had to change to meet the need of different minds, existing within different, from the past, environments, and the “Word of God”, delivered by his worldly messenger and “humble” servant, had to morph, once more. The “Word” was now delivered by a sanctioned practitioner of the mystical arts, and miracles became technologies, and words became numbers, and rituals became techniques, and the witch became the scientist – a more humble variation of his predecessors, no doubt, but no less convinced that he, with his methods, can uncover the deepest mysteries of existence and deliver a paradise on earth, step, by progressive step.
Witchcraft, has come a long way. The mind of God, His divine Will, could now be reduced to a formula, a numerical algorithm – a formula representing a pattern, but with the same promise. Would not these new, more sophisticated shaman, not be seduced by the promise of their communal standing? Would they not fall prey to human hubris and vanity, and the needs of the socioeconomic environment they found themselves in?
The ancient ones promised a successful hunt, health, a good harvest, and their reputations were built upon how well they could read the signs. These, new ones, had more tangible representations of their "insights" and their powers - machines, as extensions of human body, predictions shrunk down to the millisecond, and that promise of abolishing the mystical, the intangible, the counter-intuitive. these new magicians promised that all is driven by a central will, a pattern, not to be called God, to avoid the older to the older - here, too, as with everything, the continuity between past and present had to be cut. Evidence of commonality, severed, erased, like cleansing a crime scene.
But the evidence cannot be erased completely. The idealist, who spews words with no reference outside human systems, like class, like bourgeoisie, like equality, fairness, justice, reminds us that the Witch and the Warlock still walk among us, only now they've changed gear, garments, they've adopted different tools, rituals, and call themselves by different names. They cannot escape detection, because they remain dependent on words, and their neurological magical effects on the masses. You can still smoke them out of the multitude, discover which ones are legitimate, and which are illegitimate con-artists and self-deceiving, snake-oil salesmen and women, who have had to believe in their own lies to make them more convincing to a more sophisticated populace. All you have to do do distinguish who is who, is follow the word, as one would follow the money. If their words lead back to their own, or to an other's mind, or to a multiplicity of minds, a collective hive mind, then they are selling empty words, with a neurological effect, and nothing more besides that. If their words connect to nature, to perceptible patterns outside human minds and independent of human vanity, and egotism and fear, then they must be legitimate, at least in motive.
*****
Distinguishing the illegitimate, from the legitimate Witch, or magic user, is as easy as discovering the connections of the words (s)he uses, in her spells. If the magic only has a neuro-biological effect, and no effect outside the human body, or the community of bodies we call a tribe, or a society, then it is nothing more than a religion, an idea(l), a political dogma - a Nihilistic tool of seduction and manipulation. The magical effect has a human boundary. It is only influential within the confines of human artifices, and the particular forms, symbols, linguistics, of the ones that manufactured them.
If the effect exceeds the boundaries of human constructs, are independent of human existence and consciousness, then they are, temporarily, legitimate.
Words in a book, by the book, for the people of the book, remain just that: ink on paper - effective because many have been enchanted, placed under a spell which is pleasing, numbing, comforting.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37110 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
From the abyss of the human psyche strange configurations arise. The product of magical forces, released when mind/body energies (inter)act in the nervous system's nexus.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
"Mindless, consumerism - the brainless appetites of materialism and hedonism unleashed in a population, turned into a thoughtless, instinctive, herd. We see the symptoms in the U.S. where this infection has been the most successful, having nothing to slow its spread down - like culture, a shared heritage, family.
To fight the disease of materialism and hedonism, we have popular zombie films suggesting one must make one's self ill. It is sickness that can preserve the individual from illness and all-consuming parasitism.
The individual is either a mindless eating, instinctive, machine, rotting because time is degenerating it, or it surrenders to the collective, finding identity in the mass, sacrificing self, to a greater Self which never grows old and never, presumably, rots. But the zombies can recognize their own kind, and so when infected the one who just committed suicide, is recognized by the mindless flesh-eaters as one of their own: fellow Nihilists.
The internal, civil war, continues. The dualistic lines make sure no alternative enters the fight. One is either a mindless mass of need, obsessed with satisfaction, or one kills oneself, and becomes part of an Ideal Self, Humanity, where one's mindlessness will at least never die.
We continue to see the Cold War dynamics still in play - this internal war over hearts and minds where both sides are offering a different variant of the same nihilism."
According to Derrida, the Immune system keeps the body rigid and sheltered from within, such a petrifaction is the real disease and so the Virus that destabilizes and sets motion is an Ally...
Quote :
"In Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides, Derrida defines the autoimmunitary processes of democracy as follows: “As we know, an autoimmunitary process is that strange behavior where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘itself’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its ‘own’ immunity.”
There are two types of autoimmunity: one comprises the various forms of autoimmune diseases, in which the immune system fails to remain tolerant towards the self and starts to destroy self-tissues, the other is called natural autoimmunity, which is necessary for the body’s normal functioning.
In natural autoimmunity, the central role is played by the “immunological homunculus”, the immune system's internal image or representation of essential body mole- cules. This allows for the recognition of those self-antigens that are necessary for the body’s survival. Since any foreign pathogen attacking the body may contain elements that are the same as, or similar to, the essential molecules of the body, and these ele- ments need to be preserved rather than destroyed, the immune system contains immune cells that can recognize self antigens without giving or generating any aggres- sive, destructive response to them. In other words, the non-aggressive autoimmune cells that participate in the body’s natural autoimmunitary processes effectuate the recognition of the self even in the foreign other. At the same time, low level self-reactive immune cells also play a role in surveilling uncontrolled cell growth, and may thus reduce the incidence of cancer. All in all, natural autoimmunity, ensuring the tolerance of self-antigens, has a self-protective function, and plays a positive role in the regulation of the immune system as a whole.
On the other hand, autoimmune diseases are associated with high level autoreactive immune cells and the subsequent loss of immunological tolerance towards the self. In fact, one of the tasks of the immune system is to control those immune cells that display a high level of autoimmunity, that is, to regulate those self-reactive cells that not only recognise, but may also turn against the body’s own tissues, and thereby “pose an immediate threat of autoimmunity” (Kronenberg et al., Regulation of immunity...). Hence, when the immune system is healthy and natural autoimmunity is proper For the metaphorical transfer between the biological and the political body would suggest that the autoimmunitary processes of democracy en- tail the disavowal, the misrecognition, and the subsequent destruction of certain ele- ments proper to the community as if they were improper, foreign, “rogues”, non-self. And this, as history has so often shown us (and still does so), has disastrous conse- quences with regard to democracy. To be more specific, it could well include the ban- ishment, or deportation of elements considered as non-self.
The effects of natural autoimmunity, on the other hand, are somewhat similar to the effect of immuno-depressants that, according to Derrida, equally inscribe them- selves in a “general logic of autoimmunisation” (Derrida, Faith and Knowledge, 72-73, n27) These, as he puts it, “limit the mechanisms of rejection and facilitate the toler- ance of certain organ transplants” (ibid.). Transplants are necessary for our survival, which indicates that Derridean autoimmunity, as has already been suggested, is a risk: it implies not only a potentially life-threatening, but also a potentially life-saving openness. It offers a chance to let the other in, who, as Naas puts it, is not “properly our own,” but potentially saves our life (Derrida, Faith and Knowledge, 31).
Yet, whereas Derrida claims that “[o]ne function of the concept of autoimmunity is to act as a third term between the classical opposition between friend and foe” (Derrida, Autoimmunity, 152), the discourse of immunology remains structured by and keeps producing binaries between inside and outside, tolerance and intolerance. It maintains that the immune system gives distinctive responses to self and non-self (unless this process is inhibited by immune-depressant drugs). Thus, biological tolerance does model indeed the way tolerance works in the existing, actual socio-political sphere. As Derrida puts it, political tolerance is the acceptance “of the foreigner, the other, the foreign body up to a certain point, and so not without restrictions”, and the concomi- tant, “natural” rejection of immigrants “who do not share our nationality, our lan- guage, our culture, and our customs” (Derrida, Autoimmunity, 128). However, Derrida clearly rejects any idea of democracy functioning according to the binary logic of toler- ance and intolerance: although tolerance is clearly preferable to intolerance, toler- ance, according to Derrida, must always be conditioned by that impossible, “uncondi- tional hospitality”, which is beyond any definable politics or law. Hospitality is what must be offered to the absolute, wholly other, it is something that is “in advance open” to whoever or whatever arrives (ibid). As he puts it in Rogues:
Among the figures of unconditionality without sovereignty I have had occasion to privilege in recent years, there would be, for example, that of an unconditional hospitality that exposes itself without limit to the coming of the other, beyond rights and laws, beyond a hospitality conditioned by the right of asylum, by the right to immigration, by citizenship, and even by the right to universal hospitality [...] Only an unconditional hospitality can give meaning and practical rationality to a concept of hospitality. Unconditional hospitality exceeds juridical, political, or economic calculation. But no thing and no one happens or arrives without it. [Derrida, Rogues, 149]
Tolerance, designating the event when this absolute desire for justice gets determined in a “particular language and culture” (Naas, Derrida from Now On, 24-25), inevitably perverts hospitality: it turns it into conditional hospitality, existing within the confines of particular politics and laws. And since Derrida goes as far as to say that tolerance (as “conditional, circumspect, careful hospitality”) “is actually the opposite of hospitality”
(Derrida, Autoimmunity, 127-28), he would also oppose any metaphorical transfer be- tween what immunologists call “natural autoimmunity” (the “tolerance” of the “other” in case it is necessary for the survival of the “self”), and the political concept of auto-immunity (an ipseity in advance open to its own undoing).
since the virus lives and reproduces itself within the body’s own immune cells, that is, within the immune system itself, it does not leave the boundary between self and other, friend and foe intact. It acts, precisely, as a “third term” between friend and foe. As Derrida also claims in The Rhetoric of Drugs, the virus “belongs neither to life nor death”, and “may always already have broken into any ‘intersubjective’ trajectory” (Derrida, The Rhetoric of Drugs, 251, my emphasis). There is no virus without the immune cells that act as hosts, in other words, there is no other without the self. This is exactly the reason why the immune system, infected by HIV, has to destroy itself, which destruction obviously entails both the death of the other, the virus, and the death of (the protective system of) the self.
Fourthly, the way in which the biological body reacts to the attack of HIV, and the desparate attempts it makes to neutralise it, bears uncanny resemblances to the way in which the political body destroys itself while wanting to protect itself in Derrida’s account of autoimmunity. He outlines the relationship between autoimmunity and the vain, performative attempts to master, or neutralise the event — as well as the events still to come — in the following way: all these efforts to attenuate or neutralize the effect of the traumatism (to deny, repress, or forget it, to get over it) are but so many desperate attempts. And so many autoimmunitary movements. Which produce, invent, and feed the very monstrosity they claim to overcome. What will never let itself be forgotten is thus the perverse effect of the autoimmunitary itself. [Derrida, Autoimmunity, 99]
The more the immune system struggles to overcome traumatism, the more it becomes entangled with it, and the more it becomes exhausted by the vain struggle to neutral- ise it. In fact, one of the most conspicuous parallels between the immune system’s reaction to HIV infection, and the political community’s reaction to terrorism is their common, lethal exhaustion in trying to suppress or repress the trauma caused, and still to come.
However, whereas in Derrida’s version of autoimmunity, the protective system (of democracy) destroys itself in order to make itself vulnerable (“a living being, in quasi- suicidal fashion, ‘itself’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its ‘own’ immunity” [Derrida, Autoimmunity,]), in the medical definition of AIDS, the immune system destroys itself in order to eliminate the virus. It is this virus that, at first sight, appears to parallel Derrida’s “terrorist”, who cannot live with- out (as both outside of, and deprived of) the system it invades. As Derrida puts it: the aggression [...] comes, as from the inside, from forces that are apparently without any force of their own but that are able to find the means, through ruse and the implementation of high-tech knowledge, to get hold of an American weapon in an American city on the ground of an American airport [...] these hijackers incorporate, so to speak, two suicides in one: their own (and one will remain forever defenseless in the face of a suicidal, autoimmunitary aggression — and that is what terrorizes most) but also the suicide of those who welcomed, armed, and trained them. [Derrida, Autoimmunity, 95, my emphasis]
And although the double suicide implied in the “autoimmunitary aggression” of the terrorists seems to parallel the double suicide of the immune system infected by HIV (which destroys both itself and the virus), in Derrida’s account, the viral logic of terrorism is predicated upon that of autoimmunity: “terrorism” has always the potential to happen when democracy, as something necessarily autoimmune, is in place. As if the openness resulting from the autoimmunity (the vulnerability) of democracy always potentially entailed the unforeseeable arrival of the virus, of any virus. In this sense, Derrida seems to imply that infection is the potential risk generated by a protective system that is always already autoimmune.
In the same vein, what Derrida calls an (always necessary) “autoimmunitary perver- sion” is very much like (and I emphasise like again, because we also have to see the difference in the similarity) having unprotected sex and then welcome its risks: its po- tentially deadly or potentially happy consequences. The aporia that thus seems to emerge from Derrida’s writings is the unconditional imperative of opening up to a po- tentially lethal and potentially life-giving contact with the “Other” — which “unconditionality”, as he says, “is a frightening thing, it's scary” (Derrida, Politics and Friendship). Consequently, the imperative of unconditional opening becomes always perverted by the conditionality of the same opening: the possibility of the arrival of HIV through sex, or better to say, love, is, indeed, much less welcomed by Derrida than what the imperative of a politics of autoimmunity (unconditionally conditioned by an ethics of “hospitality”) would dictate.
Derrida also points to the non-contradictory relation between the immune and what threatens it, when he evokes, for instance, the double meaning of the term salut as both greeting (the hospitality of visitation) and salvation (immunity, health, security) in an analysis of Heidegger: “the relation is neither one of exteriority nor one of simple contradiction. I would say the same about the relationship between immunity and autoimmunity” (Derrida, Rogues, 114). Immunologists also maintain that the task of the healthy immune system is to find “appropriate responses” to changes and to keep the system “fit”."
The Under-World not just about monsters, but also 'shady' creatures, that are neither here, nor there. Virtual realities, Viruses and Parasites…
The 'philosopher' [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in his book [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] connects the vir-al vir-tual vir-ility [vir-go] with Hermes and Herme-neutics, that by moving to and fro and existing only at cross-roads keeps a "healthy" check on the total usurpation of power.
Serres, in part, like Derrida, Deleuze sees parasitic deconstruction as useful and a radical response to 'fascism', while also using it as a Marxist metaphor for fascists and the Faustian man parasitizing upon the ecosystem as a whole...
"Despite its Greek etymology of παρα, ‘beside,’ and σιτος, ‘grain, food, or by extension “one who eats at the table of another”, the word parasite appears rather late in the European languages. Its first appearance is traceable to Rabelais in 1535, and was recorded a few times in Shakespeare’s plays, e.g., Timon of Athens from 1607. Shakespeare has the hero inveigh his ‘Mouth-Friends’ as “most […] detested Parasites.”
Shakespeare wrote:
"Live loathed and long, Most smiling, smooth, detested parasites, Courteous destroyers, affable wolves, meek bears, You fools of fortune, trencher-friends, time’s flies, Cap and knee slaves, vapours, and minute-jacks! Of man and beast the infinite malady Crust you quite o’er!" [Timon of Athens, III, vi]
Baudrillard wrote:
The high degree to which AIDS, terrorism, crack cocaine or computer viruses mobilize the popular imagination should tell us that they are more than anecdotal occurrences in an irrational world. The fact is that they contain within them the logic of our system: these events are merely the spectacular expression of that system. They all hew to the same agenda of virulence and radiation, an agenda whose very power over the imagination is of a viral character." [Prophylaxy and Virulence]
Derrida wrote:
"What I do with words is make them explode so that the non-verbal appears in the verbal. That is to say that I make the words function in such a way that at a certain moment they no longer belong to discourse, to what regulates discourse. […] And if I love words it is also because of their ability to escape their proper form, whether they interest me as visible things, letters representing the spatial visibility of the word, or as something musical or audible. […] Thus, I explain myself with the bodies of words—here I think that one can truly speak of ‘the body of a word’, with the reservations mentioned earlier, that it is a body that is not present to itself—and it is the body of a word that interests me to the extent that it doesn’t belong to discourse."
Michel Serres wrote:
"The parasite invents something new. He obtains energy and pays for it in information. He obtains the roast and pays for it with stories. Two days of writing the new contract. He establishes an unjust pact; relative to the old type of balance, he builds a new one. He speaks in a logic considered irrational up to now, a new epistemology and a new theory of equilibrium. He makes the order of things as well as the states of things – solid and gas – into diagonals. He evaluates information. Even better: he discovers information in his voice and good words; he discovers the Spirit in the wind and the breath of air. He invents cybernetics." [The Parasite]
Michel Serres wrote:
"Let’s draw up the balance. In the beginning is production: the oil crusher, the butter churn, the smokehouse, the cheesemaker’s hut. Yet I would still like to know what produce means. Those who call production reproduction make the job easy. Our world is full of copiers and repeaters, all highly rewarded with money and glory. It is better to interpret that to compose; it is better to have an opinion on a decision that has already been made than to make one’s own. The modern illness is the engulfing of the new in the duplicata, the engulfing of intelligence in the pleasure of the new homogenous. Real production is undoubtedly rare, for it attracts parasites that im- mediately make it something common and banal. Real production is unexpected and improbable; it overflows with information and is always immediately parasited." [The Parasite]
We ought to be grateful to the virus for keeping our immune system fit, and relevant. The current, Modern, dis-ease, will separate the wheat from the chaff, after decades of uncontrolled reproduction, and nature excluded from returning things to a balance.
Those who can recognize the dis-eased, in their many forms, and who can "fake it", making themselves partially or temporarily ill, by smelling like the zombies that surround them looking for fresh blood, will be the ones who preserve what is being consumed by the memetic virus, now, also, manifesting as genetic mutations.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
– to one side of (‘para’) the location of the event (‘site’) – the medium or being through which communication must pass.
Communication depends upon mediation – the channel, the parasite. But it must also simultaneously ‘repress’ the fact of this mediation to be successful, to appear immediate. This is the classic paradox of mediation, we ‘forget’ the medium in order to focus on the message. The closest parallel here is with the experience of our own bodies. When the body functions well, we are able to ignore it. It is only when it breaks down in some way, when we become ill, that the fundamental mediation of life by the body becomes apparent – ‘health is the silence of the organs’ (ibid, p. 197)."
Quote :
"Second definition of the parasite
– the ‘static’ that interrupts the transmission of a message.
Serres likens this effect to that of a ringing telephone at a dinner party. The host and guests are sat enjoying their conversation when the noise of the telephone begins outside the room. At first the host tries to ignore this interruption, but eventually it becomes unbearable. She crosses the threshold and picks up the receiver. Now the conversation next door becomes the noise that is disturbing the call, at least until it is completed – ‘If I approach the table, the noise becomes conversation. In the system, noise and message exchange roles according to the position of the observer and the action of the actor’ (SERRES, 1982a, p. 66).
We might say that ‘systems work because they do not work. Nonfunctioning re- mains essential to functioning’ (ibid, p. 79)."
Quote :
"Third definition of the parasite
– the uninvited guest or ‘social’ parasite.
Parasitism appears to be a one-way re- lationship. The host provides, supplies hospi- tality, which the parasite takes without giving anything back in return. Or at least they con- tinue to do this until they are discovered and driven out.
Although the parasite appears to take without giving back, this is not strictly accurate in most cases. Consider the uninvited guest who draws up their chair to the dinner table. They ‘pay’ for their meal not with coins, but rather with their conviviality and fine story telling – ‘he obtains the roast and pays for it with stories’ (ibid, p. 36). This is an exchange of sorts, albeit an apparently unequal one. This raises the obvious question of why a host would tolerate such a deal?
Serres explains this by marking a distinction between production and information. Unlike predators, who consume their prey whole, the parasite does not exhaust production. It would be better to say that the parasite parasitizes reproduction, the propagation of production, rather than production per se. The parasite re-directs reproduction, it steers it in a new direc- tion favourable to it. Serres liken this to the addition of information to energy. He tells the fable of ‘the blind man and the cripple’, where one has energy without information and the other has the converse capacities. When the paralyzed man is hoisted onto the blind man’s shoulders they make a new whole – a ‘crossed association of the material and the logical, and exchange of the solid for a voice’ (ibid, p. 36).
The parasite is a selector, a point of decision where a new diagonal path is established that redirects the flow of production. To raw production, they add information, creating a new direction for a system.
In one fable, a hungry wretch wanders beneath the window of a restaurant kitchen. They savour the delicious smells coming from within, and their hunger feels somewhat satiated. But an outraged kitchen assistant observes this act and rushes out demanding payment. Before the dispute can come to blows, a third person arrives. They propose to resolve the argument in the following way:
Give me a coin, he said. The wretch did so, frowning. He put the coin down on the sidewalk and with the heel of his shoe made it ring a bit. This noise, he said, giving his decision, is pay enough for the aroma of the tasty dishes (SERRES, 1982a, p. 34-5).
Here is an unequal exchange - a sound pays for a smell. But it is still an exchange of sorts where previously no exchange at all was possi- ble. Normally a substance (food) is exchanged with another substance (coin). But here the parasite, the third man, finds a way of crossing this exchange with another. The sound of the coin pays for the smell of the meal. In doing so they create something new, novelty appears in the system, an unexpected channel for communication is opened – ‘the parasite invents something new. Since he does not eat like everyone else, he builds a new logic’ (ibid, p. 35).
The parasite does make a contribution to the host whom it parasitizes. It provides information and novelty in exchange for energy and production. Serres argues that this kind of exchange is fundamental to economics and to human relations. The human is the ultimate ‘universal parasite’ who turns ‘everything and everyone around him’ into a ‘hospitable space’ (ibid, p. 24). At the origin of human society we find this parasitic logic of taking without giving – ‘man milks the cow, makes the steer work, makes a roof from the tree; they have all decided who the parasite it’ (ibid, p. 24). Before the human even begins to enter into pre-capitalist relations of exchange, we find unequal exchange. Thus ‘abuse value’ comes before ‘use value’. The parasite is not the cor- ruptor of exchange relations, but rather their very foundation:
The parasite adopts a functional role; the host survives the parasite’s abuses of him – he even survives in the literal sense of the word; his life finds a reinforced equilibrium, like a sur-equilibrium. A kind of reversibility is seen on the ground of irreversibility. Use succeeds abuse, and exchange follows use. A contract can be imagined (SERRES, 1982a, p. 168)."
Quote :
"Fourth definition of the parasite
– a living organism that takes without giving as it infects its host.
Serres likens it to an empty set or a white space that is invaded by the parasite, who chases out all the others, creating disequilibrium – ‘the introduction of parasite in a system is equivalent to the introduction of noise... time does not begin without its intervention’ (ibid, p. 184).
The parasite gives the host the means to be safe from the parasite. The organism rein- forces its resistance and increases its adaptability. It is moved a bit away from its equilibrium and it is then even more strongly at equilibrium. The generous hosts are therefore stronger than the bodies without visits (SERRES, 1982a, p. 193).
Both Leriche and Canguilhem argued that illness and pathology push the organism to adapt by shifting the normative basis of its functioning. Through illness, the organism discovers new modes of normativity. For Serres, the episodes of crisis represented by illness provoke an organic system to settle around ‘counternorms’. The parasite hardens the system against further parasitism. This same logic of norms and counternorms can be shifted to human relations. The meal at the dinner table, or the discussion at the table in Plato’s Symposium, is disrupted by the uninvited guest, the parasite. The existing guests then work together to expel the parasite, and in so doing become a different form of collective.
Serres’ draws here upon Rene Girard’s (1978) account of scapegoating. For Girard, the scapegoat is a person who is an ‘innocent party who polarizes a universal hatred’ (1987, p. 5). This hatred emerges through a mediated form of emotion that Girard terms ‘mimetic desire’. Our desires are fundamentally based on taking those of others as models. Thus, vicariously, what the other wants is what I want. Mimesis gives rise automatically to rivalry, as we come to see the other as an obstacle to the fulfilment of our desires. The solution is to nominate a particular individual – the scapegoat – who will become the collective object of hatred, and whose expulsion or destruction will temporarily resolve the problem of rivalry.
Serres blends Girard’s account of scape- goating with parasitism:
History hides the fact that man is the universal parasite, that everything and everyone around him is a hospitable space. Plants and animals are always his hosts; man is always necessarily their guest. Always taking, never giving. He bends the logic of exchange and of giving in his favour when he is dealing with nature as a whole. When he is dealing with his kind, he continues to do so; he wants to be the parasite of man as well. And his kind want to be so too. Hence rivalry (SERRES, 1982a, p. 24).
Since humans are parasites to one another, rivalry must occur, which is solved by sacrifice – the existing guests work together to expel the uninvited guest. Such expulsion helps to adapt social relations to subsequent acts of parasitism and shifts the basis of the community towards new norms. The history of human relations is the history of parasitism, scapegoating and the provocation to adapt to new norms. It is not the ‘war of all against all’ that Hobbes described. It is the war of all against one: the parasite who will become the scapegoat."
Quote :
"Fifth definition of the parasite
– the one who is always near to food, close to the meat.
The parasite becomes the scapegoat, who is expelled. But this does not end the matter: the parasite always comes back.
This is the ‘return of the repressed’, as Serres puts it. To understand the significance of this return we need to follow Serres’ account of property relations. Property comes from enclosure, from drawing a boundary or partition. The most basic form of this partitioning is found in eating practices: Whoever was a lodger for a long time, and thus in a group even in the most secret acts where the private is never safe, remembers someone who was not willing to divide the salad course. When the salad bowl came, he spat in it, and the greens were his. The salad was all his; no one argued with him (SERRES, 1982a, p. 140).
Spitting on the food renders it unclean to others, but not to the one who spits – ‘as soon as you soil it ...it is yours’ (ibid, p. 144). The origin of property is in this play of dirt and cleanliness. What is ours is always clean to us, however dirty is appears to others. One’s own dung smells good.
The parasite continuously interrupts the meal, seeking ways to make some of it their own, to transform what is common into their own property. Serres sees this transformation as not just pivotal to human relations, but also to knowledge itself. Throughout his work he re- peats the story of the origins of geometry in the work of the harpedonats who were charged with dividing up the fertile land left in the flood plain of the river Nile (see SERRES, 1982, p. 178-180; SERRES, 1990). This required the technical invention of methods of measurement to judge disputed boundary lines. The white space is differentiated. Serres see this as akin to the grand foundational gestures made in philosophy. Descartes, for example, creates a white space through his stratagem of doubt, which is then differentiated into Cartesian reason – ‘the Cartesian meditation eliminates, expels, banishes everything, hyperbolically... and this slate and this spot are the extent to which I am master and possessor of my own thought’ (SERRES, 1982a, p. 180).
The white space does not stay empty for long though. Like a freshly tilled garden, the parasites – the weeds, the rabbits – soon find a way to come back in. What is expelled returns. In fact, exchange itself is a kind of return. When we sell the fruits of our labour, what we gain is what we have expelled in a different form. Serres discusses the bible story of Joseph who was envied and scapegoated by his brothers, who secretly sold him into slavery. The gold pieces are the first of his returns that punctuate the story.
Money is, of course, the universal exchanger, the ultimate instance of Marx’s ‘general equivalent’. For Serres it is the most abstract form taken by the parasite, a return of the repressed. And if one’s own dung is never unclean then ‘money doesn’t smell. It is mine; it’s a little pile of shit; it doesn’t smell; it’s everyone’s. It is mine, yours, yet it is clean and hence exchangeable’ (ibid, p. 145). The greater the effort exerted to chase away the parasite, to purge the white space, to defend property, the more abstract the parasite becomes.
Serres then offers a unique account of power. We have learned from Foucault (1979) to mistrust the idea of ‘sovereign power’ as cen- tralised. Power is distributed, it infuses social relations in such a way that it acts upon our actions rather than proscribes. Serres takes this account one stage further. Power is part of the game of parasitism. The parasite does not seek to establish property rights, they merely exploit all such efforts at enclosure and create a vector where everything flows towards them. In the chain or cascade of parasites that opens up in every white space, the position of power is always found in she or he who comes last. From this position, one may parasitise all the others. Once again, the only thing the parasite fears is another parasite waiting behind them.
Serres (1982b) refers to this as ‘the wolf’s game’, after a fable by Aesop. A wolf chances upon a lamb drinking from a stream. The wolf accuses the lamb of muddying his water. The lamb replies that they are drinking downstream and could not possibly do so. In reply, the wolf accuses the lamb of having slandered him in the past and drags him off into the woods for slaughter. The game here is to arrive a position ‘downstream’. It does not matter how this is done. The wolf makes an unfounded accusation that renders him as the aggrieved party – justice must be done. The king establishes a set of tributes such that a slice of production must always be reserved for him. The trader finds a way to short sell the market.
Power depends less on authority than it does upon the invention of technical means to come downstream, to be in the last position in a parasitic chain. The secret of power is the discovery of the ‘wolf’s game’, of the means to jump to the end of a cascade of parasites:
He who is well-placed has the right to eat the others. It is always a question of a meal, of visitors and of guests. What does the lion give in exchange for his good? Nothing? Not entirely. An edict, a document, a passport, words and writing. He pays for his meal in well-turned, well written phrases. And thus he is in the position of a parasite, a universal parasite. One day we will have to understand why the strongest is the parasite – that is to say, the weakest – why the one whose only function is to eat is the one who commands. And speaks. We have found the place of politics (SERRES, 1982a, p. 26).
In order to play this game well, the parasite needs a detailed understanding of space. They need to see points of connection, routes, boundaries, regions that can transformed – ‘the master is always a geometer, a topologist, and someone who knows space first of all’ (ibid, p. 59). If parasitism is fundamental form taken by power, then topology is its pre-eminent science and the mathematics of fuzzy sets its basic logic."
Quote :
"Sixth definition of the parasite
– a ‘thermal exciter’, that which catalyses the system to a new equilibrium state.
Joseph seems to circulate between numerous identities and positions:
He is a slave, he is a majordomo; he is a prisoner; he is the bailiff of the jailor; the master of his brothers. Joseph is not fixed in his identity... For a long time, he is not recognized, his justice is not known; he is both master and slave (SERRES, 1982a, p. 159).
This circulation between identities has a function. Joseph makes connections, he enables a pathway to be built between forms of order that otherwise could not communicate: Pharaoh with his dreams; the Egyptians with the famine; the House of Israel with its rival brothers. It is the capacity to transform, to become the missing piece that forms the link that gives Joseph his unique trajectory through circumstances. Serres names Joseph as ‘joker’:
[I]t is especially a Judaic invention ... that the one who is sacrificed is substituted, that suddenly the victim is something else: a goat, a kid, but also the beginning of a completely other series. I shall call this object a joker ... This white object, like a white domino, has no value so as to have every value. It has no identity, but its identity, its unique character, its difference, as they say, is to be, indifferently, this or that unit of a given set. The joker is king or jack, ace or seven or deuce ... A is b, c, d, etc. Fuzzy. ...That joker is a logical object that is both indispensable and fascinating. Placed in the middle or at the end of a series, a series that has a law of order, it permits it to bifurcate, to take on another appearance, another direction, a new order (SERRES, 1982a, p. 160).
The joker is a card in a game that serves to alter the direction of play. It interrupts the game and makes a new set of moves possible. Likewise, the white or blank domino can chan- ge the fortunes of a player because it can be played to link sequences of dominos that are otherwise incommensurable. In a way this special object is both the weakest and strongest in the game. It has no particular value, and hen- ce appears to be extraneous, worthy of being gotten rid of as soon as possible in favour of more valuable tokens. But at the same time it has the capacity to take on all possible values in the game, and at particular moments in the unfolding of the game it can be the most highly prized of all tokens.
The story of Joseph demonstrates that jokers – those who are not fixed in identity and therefore can take on all identities – are indispensable to social order. They are tokens of exchange, and as such are traded, excluded, sacrificed. But they always return, and in so doing transform the social setting such that new connections and pathways are possible – ‘the movement, the hesitation, the vibration, and the double frenzy of inclusion and exclusion constitute the joker in a multiplicity of situations, in a spectrum of possibilities’ (ibid, p. 161) The joker is a particular form of parasite that provokes activity within the system. It introduces a change of play, a raising of stakes, a redistribution of fortunes in the game and possible outcomes.
The capacity for social ordering to proceed in different directions is relative to that of the joker:
The ramification of the network depends on the number of jokers. But I suspect there is a limit to this. When there are too many, we are lost as if in a labyrinth. What would a series be if there were only jokers? What could be said of it? (SERRES, 1982a, p. 162).
An ordered series depends on the presen- ce of a joker to enable it to ramify, to make novel connections. Yet it also depends upon the comparative rarity of the joker.
There is no game when there are only jokers. Similarly, if there were no hosts, only parasites, then life would not be sustainable. For Serres, production or energy must be common, abundant, in order to sustain parasitism. The joker is the special or ‘rare’ element that circulates through the energetic pathways of the system. Serres compares the movement of the joker to that of a token in a child’s game such as ‘hunt the slipper’ or ‘button, button, who’s got the button?’ In such games, the aim is usu- ally to pass on the token such that one is not holding it when the round of play stops. The players then gain their individual status throu- gh the relationship they have with the token – ‘if he is discovered he is ‘it’. Who is the subject, who is an ‘I’ or who am I? The moving furet [token] weaves the ‘we’, the collective, if it stops, it marks the ‘I’’ (ibid, p. 225).
A better example is that of a rugby match. Here the players arrange themselves in relation to the passing of the ball, which is the primary object on the pitch – ‘playing is nothing else but making oneself an attribute of the ball as a substance’ (ibid, p. 226). The movement of the ball will determine the ‘hero’ who scores, the ‘villain’ who fails to intercept a pass, the ‘hog’ who fails to pass the ball on quickly enough. The subject (from subjectus xxx or subjicere xxx) is literally she or he who is ‘put beneath’ or ‘subjugated’ to the movement of the ball. This gives the ball-token a curious status. It is certainly an object, but one with the remarkable power to mark out subjects, it is an ‘astonishing constructer of intersubjectivity’ (ibid, p. 227). Serres calls such a token a ‘quasi-object’:
This quasi-object is not an object, but it is one nevertheless since it is not a subject, since it is in the world; it is also a quasi-subject, since it marks or designates a subject, who, without it, would not be a subject... This quasi-object, when being passed, makes the collective, if it stops it makes the individual (SERRES, 1982a, p. 225).
The central proposition that Serres makes here is that social ordering is not a collecting together of individuals, but rather a set of sets of ‘plays’ around the quasi-object. There is no social contract as such, rather a material grounding of social relations with this special object, this joker, this peculiar parasite that is neither properly subject nor object but rather that upon which relationships as such between persons are founded. It is the ‘elementary relation’ (ibid, p. 224) on which all relations of collectivity and individuality are to be understood.
Serres particular contri- bution is to demonstrate that the classical logic of the excluded middle is faulty and genera- tes a ‘third man’ position from which identity is distributed. Personifying this ‘third man’ or ‘third space’ as the parasite, Serres explores how thirdness both makes communication possible and interrupts it simultaneously. Echoing the slogan of Deleuze & Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, Serres asserts that ‘things work because they don’t work’. We are only together because of the parasite.
Parasitism becomes, for Serres, the central ‘fact’ of existence. Without interruption, a system would be locked into an equilibrium state, entirely closed off the rest of the world. It is the inclusion of exteriority into a system, the inva- sion of the host by the parasite, which acts to ‘dope’ or ‘excite’ it. Transformation and change are the outcomes of parasitic operations of analysis (redirection), paralysis (disturbance) and catalysis (transformation).
The parasite is the elementary form of relations. It is the basis of intersubjectivity, of our ‘being together’. We must think of social ordering as one instance of a broader work of making and transforming relations through parasitism. Hence to seek a basis for social order in terms of some kind of contract or conflict between individuals is mistaken. Mediation, ‘thirdness’, is the necessary grounds for the intersubjective, indeed for subjectivity itself. Serres is then able to redescribe many of the fundamental concepts of the human and social sciences – communication, exchange, history, power, society – as outcomes of parasitized relations. Abuse value is the basis of all value. The included third is what allows for the excluded third. Knowledge itself arises from the noise of the parasite."
Borg = sexless, race-less, species-less, mechanical zombies. Worker bees, ants. No self-consciousness. a collective consciousness. Individual un-Consciousness manifesting as Collective Consciousness. Artificial prosthetics have overpowered the flesh and blood of the original genetic organism meme overpowering genes - Nihilism.
Mechanics, technologies, compensate for inherited biological deficiencies producing artificial parity. Internal conflict non-existent. All conflict comes from external sources of resistance...which is, supposedly, futile.
Borg have no god. They are their own god. Humanity for the degenerate Modern. Borg have no ideal. They are their own ideal - the Collective, Humanity is their ideal. An abstraction, a noetic construct.
Self-referential. Esoteric. Solipsistic, subjective, individually; controverting proselytizing, as a collective. Mind/Body divide. Specialization. Compartmentalization - Orwellian newspeak. Worlds/Symbols the collective's code for sharing data, guidance.
Relatively harmless, weak, simple, slow, as individuals, dangerous in groups.....like bovines, like all herd animals. Like fire ants, and wasps. They seek collectives to compensate for their individual feebleness.
Borg archetype displays the simplistic creativity of geometric shapes, corresponding to binary thinking – mathematical self-consistence 1/0. Either/Or. Dualism. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] What threatens the collective is quarantined, sent for repairs. Rehabilitation. Recycled, if it proves inefficient. Borg vocalizations express the communal will, as a harmonious synthesis. – Monotone. Each Drone is different in external functionality, but always part of the uniformity of the whole. It’s only designating distinction is one of communal utility – work/job. Marxist Utopia. Trans-humanism - cyborg zombies. Interchangeable prosthetic. Organic body acts as a template, a clean slate, over which artificiality is assimilated, covering it up, accentuating it, altering its identifying designations. Male/Female are meaningless terms, as is race. Reproduction occurs through assimilation - parasitical. Memetic Virus; mental dis-ease.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37110 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
Individuality, the sum of all past, all nurturing (nature) is subsumed into the collective. Prosthetics overwhelms the particularities of the biology. Techniques/Technologies overpower, replace, the biology’s past. Its race, sex, species, is insignificant, because the machinery, the automatic reactivity, is compensated with code – learned, programmed, behaviour. Techniques/Technologies compensate for all biological, genetic, weakness, raising all up to a uniformity of mediocrity. The advantage is found in efficiency of specialization and synergy.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37110 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
Star Trek is a post-modern fantasy of the perfect State. Not only race mixing, but species mixing is part of the norm. Implying bestiality. Vile biological functions are never mentioned. there are no toilets to be found, and eating has become that of consuming recycled energy. No conflict, other than against those who refuse the Federation.
Klingons in the most recent version are portrayed as alt-right types, destined to be assimilated in its canon; tamed to become another member of the Federation - Borg-light. What remains but to explore and to play games, or to become an artist?
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37110 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
Magic is incorporated under the heading of technological advancements - technical miracles. Time travel, teleportation, telepathy are within technological reach. Science makes superstitions and spiritual concepts possible. Merger of science and Abrahamic religion. God reveals himself through machines.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37110 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
Vampires were explored in this thread, a very long time ago.
Some basic characteristics defining this metaphorical creature that, nevertheless, refers to real world character types, viz., characters/caricatures (public self), concealing a personae (private self).
1- Vampires are nocturnal - existing in the shadows. They die in the sunlight, and have become afraid of it. They burn away under direct sunlight. Artificial lighting, on the other hand, has no effect on them; manmade lighting is tolerable, even if they still prefer the twilight, shadowed, realm where nothing is ever as it seems and the prey cannot discern the hue of their skin, evolved in dark conditions. A metaphor with deeper implications.
2- Vampires are long-lived, if not immortal. They can only be exterminated in specific ways, e.g., silver bullet to the heart, decapitation etc. We might say the biological body is sacrificed for the "vampire" to take-over and continue on. The human dies, upon conversion into a vampire state. What survives in not human - this is made clear by the fact that they cannot procreate of survive using natural biological means. The converted individual is, in effect, dead, and what "lives" on only retains the individual's experiences but none of the DNA memories that can be passed on - there is minimal memory continuity to identify it as the same individual as the one it was before conversion.
3- Vampires are parasitical. Moving among and mingling with a host species; they appear to belong to the host they feed upon, and propagate through, via non-biological means. [Here the connection with nihilistic memes is most obvious - genes to memes, ceases to apply and is inverted to pure memetic propagation, i.e., selfish meme]. The physical body is sacrificed for the benefit of the meme, i.e., dogma, ideology.
4- They congregate in covenants, with their own secret hierarchies. Their society is like a shadow existing beneath the host's social infrastructure.
5- They drain the host but may not kill it - biological usury. A host is kept on the edge of death, gradually reducing its life's essence, via the draining of its life-blood. A metaphor with its own insinuations. The "victim" experiences it as pleasure - similar to how vampire bats inject a localized narcotic on the bovine they feed upon. The association of vampirism with erotic pleasure is here clear. A falling away form the experience of existing, viz., existence experienced as perpetual need/suffering, to which this acts as a relieving reprieve, i.e., a negative estate, in accordance with Schopenhauerian insights.
6- They are a sub-species of the species they parasitize. A sub-species infected with some kind of mystical, magical, disease, which can be considered a curse or a blessing.
7- Originally they were portrayed as monstrosities, with hooked noses and long nails and fangs. In recent times they have been portrayed as seductive, erotic, sexy, cultured individuals - a change that may be traced to their own increasing influence on the popular culture of the host members they coexist with.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37110 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
Reenergizing this thread... As was noted modern, superheroes/supervillains are allegorical caricatures each representing postmodern urban caricatures; masked characters representing biological organ hierarchies, expressed as personalities (personas). Every comic book hero/villain is a mythological construct, filling in a psychosomatic void in modern individuals. This is why there are so many of them. A kind of amalgamation between a biologically determined personae and a socially determined ideal, expressed via metaphorical symbolic, memetic ways. Here gene and memes converge in postmodern caricatures, where the genetic is reduced to an inconsequential, feeble, shameful, secret, nd the memetic idol compensates and usurps it.
The meme is always supernatural - if it detaches from genetic limitations - when natural order and biological inheritance is negated and forgotten - falling into Lethe. the individual is theoretically reborn as idol/icon, imitating the process of Jesus becoming Christ. Postmodern individuals are singular god-like entities, in their own minds - semiotic constructs, mirroring their deepest insecurities and anxieties - overcompensating for what they've inherited biologically, i.e., genetically. Hyperbolical projections of noetic ideals. They are not natural but supernatural; not real but surreal.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37110 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
The idea of "magic", relative to the production of supernatural effects, is n allusion to the power of semiotics, affecting mind and via the mind the organic body, which then becomes a agency of its externalized effect. Language to "cast spells", implies their almost mysterious ability to affect bodies at a distance.
If we extend our own definition of the modern/postmodern mythology, i.e., describing artificial urban landscapes and the creatures populating it, represented by the comic boom heroes/villains and proverbial movie caricatures, e.g., vampires, monsters, werewolves, Frankenstein, etc., then linguistic magic corresponds to the magical effects of wardrobe, and make-up, and surgical alterations of the physical form, to manufacture - conjure up form seemingly nowhere - a specific image.
This "image" is the image of the public character/caricature, concealing a private personae, inherited genetically via DNA, determining organ symmetries/proportionalities and the subsequent hagiarchy that this expresses, or transmits to the brain, where it manifests as impulse, disposition, demeanour, i.e., personality. It's ability to convince alludes to the seductive quality of the performance, becoming, for an audience, "genuine" - for the cynic a ruse - and for the empath a hyperbolic portion of a fluctuating pattern.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37110 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
Indeed....quintessentially parasitical. A mask over a mask, concealing another mask... Say one thing, think a second, do a third.
Meme usurping genes, by pretending to be life affirming when it is a product of a death cult. The price for memetic survival? The light. [You must be registered and logged in to see this image.] Condemning yourself to an eternity in the dark - covenant of darkness forgoing the light just to gain eternity. those chosen for conversion - worthy of its "gift" are those who have already grown sick of life and the living.
Once you've made the conversion all you have is pleasure/pain; an identity founded on suffering, on being chosen to suffer by a divinity - your role to weed out the weak; part of your accepted sacred mission, your identity, is to prey on those who are to become victims as you have been victimized by a higher power. [You must be registered and logged in to see this image.] Add a nil - zero - and you have the age of the approximate age of the occult covenant - gathering in secret in subterranean urban places - urban foundations underlying the surfaces where the children of the light intercourse beneath the sun.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.] Eternally innocent....free from responsibility. They accept no redemption and so shame and guilt have no power over them - shame being but a weapon they can use against their victims.
When you are chosen by an external - eternal - will to become its agency. Seduction replaces previous strategies. The inhuman pretending to be humanitarian, pretending to be human.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37110 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
All these superheroes/supervillains, all these supernatural creatures are representations of modern, usually urban, psychosomatic memotypes. The gene/meme relationship unfolding into psychological subspecies of the genotype, species. Memes multiply or divide genetic potentials. This is represented as extraordinary, supernatural, mental powers or dispositions, world-views, attitudes, towards existence and oneself in relation to existing.
Every trait, psychical or mental, in the description of the caricature representing how the mind synthesized with the body it gradually became aware of. The most bizarre forms manifested when a mind is dominated by nihilism, or a negative attitude, world-view, towards the tangible, the physical, the experienced world, i.e., existence.
Personae = Genetic - personality - determined by genetic factors (nature - body) establishing organ hierarchies - private self. Character = Memetic - caricature - determined by socioeconomic factors (nurture - mind) establishing social hierarchies - public self.
Artistic representations of supernatural beings depict the synthesis of the two, i.e., personae/character - monstrosities, superhuman; hyperbolic representation of private and public self unified.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37110 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
In the Under-World - metaphysical reality - all is not as it appears to be. Physical identity is erased, or concealed, beneath fabrications. An individual is who they say they are - is identified ideologically, abstractly, linguistically; clothing is a form of concealment and signaling - an alternate skin.
The original utility of symbols/words is erased (nullified), creating ana artificial clean slate (tabula rasa)so as to allow the body to be rewritten, recreated, from nothingness, by the mind. When they speak of the one-god they mean the mind - universal consciousness. World is now a emptiness to be created anew...individually or collectively, ergo the meme-spcecies is a collective cooperatively working to semiotically reinvent reality....
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37110 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
Everything becomes confusing here... obscure. This is why they say humans are ‘complex’ – fabricated convolution – meaning they are pretending to be ‘other than,’ a manifestation of something occult, mysterious, incomprehensible – lies, self-deciet, confusing all exchanges a defensive game of insanity, all meant to conceal the real. Words create world, they declare it into existence and the collective participates in creatively cultivating maintaining fantastic illusions. “I am who I say I am, not what I appear to be” – words/symbols are magical, popularity, repetition, multiplies their magical power. Collectives become a multiplying paranormal force. All participating in a play they are inventing together. If you support the other's role he'll support you in yours – reciprocity, the Golden Rule of improvisational theater.
Some pronounced examples are posted here: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37110 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
Nihilism is a method for the mind to negate the body, tangible reality, theoretically erasing what limits its self-creations. Free-will denial is a way of concealing the implications of this world creation - claiming innocence when the shit hits the fan and the objective worlds makes you pay for your linguistically declared abstract world's failure.
Like declaring the world null and void and then yourself not responsible for the consequences of living in your own delusions.
You know, Mary Land lives like a slut, justifying it any which way makes her feel good about herself, and then nature - that cares not for her bullshyte - sends her am unexpected consequence of her humble arrogance anmd selfish selflessness, and what does she do? She tells herself that she could not have avoided it? Because she had no choice....the choice she made was inevitable.
See how it works? All neat and deceptively complex... Simple really, if you cut through the rubbish and you see Mary as she is, not as she wants to be perceived and believes that she is.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37110 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
Every Superhero and Supervillain, represents a urbanite type - based on their particular nihilistic or realistic ideology/dogma. Meme Species, breeds, kins of man. Always urbanites, because such abstractions can only exist within manmade, maintained, environments. We can call them characters - or socioeconomic caricatures, concealing the individual's biologically determined personae. An ideological suit.
