Prosthetic Paradise(2) Enfetishment&MS (fwd)

[Joseph Porter]

On Mon, 6 Dec 1999, Lorentzen / Nicklaus wrote:

> 
> Jody schrieb:
> 
> >Are you implying that "the perfectly
> >'rationalized' form of the Archontic Terror, that had been going on  in the
> >Garden of Eden ever since the Fall" ...was caused by some sort of sin, of
> >com or om?
> 
>  Uuhhh, don't you remember the nasty things we did after you gave me that 
>  apple ... ?!  
> 

Was it memory that kicked in after you bit, or just the ability to compare
your new attitude with an ideal. Some might say idealism was the worm in
that apple.

> > But, I say, are Auschwitz, the Gulag and Hiroshima...not to mention those
> > materialized souls, really so terrifying? Are they more or less terrifying
> > than, say, the irreversible car accident , or any other pseudo-random
> > event? 
> 
>   To me they somehow are. This was refering to Paul's formulation "Age of   
>   Enlightment". A project of science & politics, promising to take away the 
>   fears & injustices between the people ... Nice try. At least the Gulag &   
>   Hiroshima were meant to defend the "Age of Enlighment" against its enemies,   
>   no? And before the war the Nazi eugenics programme was praised by leading   
>   Western newspapers as very "modern" & "progressive" ... Foucault once     
>   recommended to look where the danger comes from. Well, when I'm going to buy  
>   the new "Spiegel" later this day there will probably be again of those pretty 
>   decent advertisements of the pharma industry telling me to "Imagine" (- by   
>   using the English word they, that's really sick, refer to Lennon's song) a   
>   world in which 'heartache will be only something temporary among lovers' or   
>   something like that.

But there is no need to jump onto the pendulum to watch its course and
learn to duck when it sweeps too close. No one on this list is being
tortured by Nazis, or suffering from bomb induced radiation sickness, or
having their genome evaluated by a duly appointed board. Imagination
swings at least both ways. The fascinating quality of Pynchon's text comes
from the fidelity w/ historical detail, and, the insistence (being polite
here) on freedom to imagine what being a Nazi might feel like, not just
the victimhood of a slave laborer, without the Hollywood Review Board, or
whatever the fuck they were called, insisting on outcomes matching up with
some preconceived ideas of propriety going into the theatre. To imagine
what Lennon suggested, imagination, like Maxwell, must go free...Or the
feelings of its form will be sublimated. It is the Archons who dictate
what forms sublimation is allowed to take. The archons are here to stay,
some good some bad.I would rather be a good Archon than a bad Archon, or a
victim of any kind. How does one tell a good Archon from a bad Archon? The
good Archons always win. It may take a millenium or two, but we never
fail. If you don't believe that, then you may as well open the oven door
for yourself and walk in, because you will be no good to us, and we won't
open it for you. We will, however, act to keep bad Archons from making
ovens and putting victims in them. No revengence, though. That leads
to oven making.


    And Microsoft is already developing its genetic screening 
>   software. In the Swiss Kanton Basel there hasn't been a single birth of a 
>   child with downs syndrome for more than 15 years. And in the USA, I recently 
>   read, there is an uprising social movement propagating the selection of life  
>   partners according to genetic criteria. "What a beautiful world this will be  
>   ...". The "post-postmodern State" will return to "bio-politics" and this is   
>   where we're going to day by day. One day, to give an example, this "3 times & 
>   you're out"-thing won't work anymore, and then somebody, probably a harmless  
>   looking fellow with a likeable expression on his face, will suggest new ways  
>   to keep poor people away from suburbia ... And all these materalized souls,   
>   practicing 'health & sports' as if this would save their bodyminds from   
>   decaying, will nod (- "Sounds like a reasonable concept") and then go on with 
>   worrying about their golf handicaps ...

I am not offended by your pessimism. Whatever gets you through the night.
Personally, however,I don't feel particularly victimized by the trends you
allude to, if not exagerate the seriousness of. They are perhaps serious,
but using them as icons, or stringing them together into a chorus of
pessimism doesn't help me to understand exactly how, and why I should be
worried, shocked or concerned. It becomes like geese returning to the
flock- certain gestures and attitudes must be displayed, in order to be
accepted. But I guess that's okay, as well, even if any real discussion of
importance is lost in the "group affirming postures of pessimism and/or
victimhood." Whatever. I'm a good Archon.I have patience.

>  
> > I think we all tend to be a little too comfitted by some underlying
> > instinctual, irrational "blanky" called randomness, once luxuriant, but now
> > really quite holey.
> > Even those snowballs follow paths.
> 
>   Not quite sure whether I understand you correctly (- my dictionary doesn't 
>   know the word "holey").

"Holey" is the adjectival form of the noun hole. My statement implies that
we are incapable of proving whether or not some subset of everything is
truly random, since all measurement of any quantity or quality is always
made by comparison with some standard, and it is impossible to prove the
negative, i.e., that god (or a universal pattern) doesn't exist. At any
rate, a random set, if there is such a thing, is only random once. The
first billion digits of pi, e.g. could be used as a cipher, to fool
someone who hadn't generated them, or generated the algorithm to generate
them, because the pattern would appear random. But it's not.It's
ulta-specific and deep. It just doesn't repeat itself. But it can be
repeated, just never caught up with. It is a function of the expansion of
the universe.

    Being "thrown" into the conditional world we are 
>   always moving inside it. All events are coined by structures. From a     
>   sociological perspective we can, with Luhmann, also say that all   
>   communications take place inside (- and never ever outside)of society. So in 
>   the moment the system communicates there are, at the 
>   same time und not to anticipate, world wide many other communications, 
>   observations of observations, in this endless universe of meaning.
>   But maybe all this is only constituted by our "forms of view" (-
Kant's    
>   "Anschauungsformen") and not by things themselves. Like Jim Morrison once 
>   wrote in a poem: "The bird or insect that stumbles into a room/ and cannot 
>   find the window. Because they know/ no 'windows'" (The Lords and The New 
>   Creatures, p. 35).
> 
>   THEY are the Archons (- if you don't believe me, ask Harold Bloom). This 
>   certain metaphysical gloom, we also find in Burroughs & the late R.D. 
>   Brinkmann, is one of the things that fascinates me most in Pynchon. And in all 
>   three cases the narrative perspective is clearly situated after the historical 
>   turning from enlightment into madness, that culminated in the macro crimes 
>   between 1930 and 1945. Each of these crimes is somehow unique.
>   On the socio-spiritual uniqueness of Hiroshima: "The Bomb blasted a hole in 
>   humanity's collective soul. With the ever-present threat of total destruction 
>   by human agency, century's of faith in a transcendent external principle - and 
>   the socio-political structures built around it - evaporated. Hell was now only 
>   five minutes away, and the likelihood of a divine hand reaching out to stop it 
>   was remote. Matter was now negotiable, as was the destiny of the
species. 
>   (...) Demons are configurations of energy/information, and any configuration 
>   is now possible. All the demons are out of the box, and the true spirit of the 
>   age now has a name. This is the Age of All Demons - This is the
>   PanDaemonAeon." 
>   (Templum Nigri Solis: ANNO CHAOS---THE PANDAENONAEON. pp. 205-207 in:    
>   Christopher S. Hyatt (ed.): Rebels & Devils. The Psychology of Liberation.    
>   Tempe, Arizona 1996: New Falcon Publications)   
> 
> 
>                                                      Wishful/Sinful -Kai

I guess I'm one of them, notice the lower case t, a member of the
counterforce.


jody